Most people have heard the word acupuncture and know it involves placing needles into the skin to relieve pain. However, if you’re accustomed to looking at healthcare from a Western perspective, you might have a few questions beyond that…so here’s a brief explanation.
Acupuncture is just one component of the ancient Chinese healthcare practice called Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), which also includes the use of herbs, meditative practices, and other types of healing modalities. At the core of TCM is the idea that illness or pain results when there is an energetic imbalance among any of the systems in the body, a concept that has no true counterpart in Western medicine, which focuses on identifying a precise cause for a specific disease or pain syndrome,
While effective, Western healing very much relies upon medications that can create dependencies and/or produce negative side effects, especially when dealing with pain issues. The value of acupuncture is that it produces little or no negative side effects, making it an alternative that has steadily grown in popularity.
Acupuncture, along with the other aspects of TCM, has been used with success for thousands of years in Eastern cultures – not only relieve pain but to resolve illnesses as well. Ancient texts record how it enhanced the body’s natural healing power and restored balance among the various parts of the body, organs, and systems.
But will it be as effective in the West? At the 1997 National Institutes of Health consensus conference reports were introduced showing positive evidence for acupuncture’s effectiveness. More recently The World Health Organization compiled a long list of pain issues and diseases, drawing from hundreds of clinical studies showing what acupuncture has been beneficial for. You can find this list at: https://www.acupuncture.org.uk/public-content/public-traditional-acupuncture/4026-who-list-of-conditions.html
The list includes pain of various sorts, including back pain, arthritis, sciatica and musculoskeletal aliments. However, its effectiveness doesn’t stop there. This list includes a wide range of illnesses and diseases including nausea, sleep disorders, obesity, Parkinson’s disease, and diabetes.
Acupuncture restores the balance and harmony that has been disrupted by outside influences, the environment, or even emotions by gently inserting one-time use, pre-sterilized, disposable needles into specific points on the body – and not always where you’d think! This stimulation sets off both physiological and energetic triggers that allow the body’s natural healing processes to kick in.
Would you like to find out if acupuncture will help your body achieve its natural balance? Our mission at The Pain Relief Center is to help everyone feel better in his or her body, and acupuncture is one more way we help you do that.