Acupuncture can Help with That (Really!)
If you have any health problems (hey, who doesn’t?) and you are reading this blog, chances are you have a pretty good, more-or-less specific idea of what it is that you need help with. Maybe you suffer from migraines, or allergies, or weird pains and mood swings that happen on a monthly basis. Your back or knees might be a source of persistent concern, or you might be worried about changes in your digestion. It might even be that you are just feeling ‘unwell’ in the sense that your energy level is a little lower than you remember, or your overall level of excitement about life seems off.
In modern Western culture, we like things clear-cut and simple. One problem, one cause, and one solution. Keeps things simple, I guess. When it comes to our health, it seems almost an imperative for most people to find the specific, one solution to the specific, one problem they have. Moreover, it should work to resolve the problem in the specific way that they want and expect. We seem to want pain medicine for pain, cold medicine for colds, replacement bits for the bits that seem to have stopped working, and so on.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. Anyone who’s been wandering around trying to get that kind of solution to their health concerns very quickly discovers that doctors and other health professionals seem to beat around the bush a lot when it comes to determining what is wrong and how to deal with it. They give you some pills and tell you to go home. If that doesn’t work, they give you more pills, maybe send you for some tests. Then, they tell you it might be something else and give you more tests. If you’re un-lucky and your problem persists, they might decide to cut you open to take a look, maybe cut some bits out. If your problem persists beyond their patience threshold, they might give you some pills to help you forget about it. And so it goes.
I know, I know — it isn’t always like that. But the picture is familiar, isn’t it? Surely, some people will claim that it worked for them: that they went to their doctor, the doctor prescribed a pill, and it all went away. To those people I say, congratulations! Also, why are you even reading this? More likely, best-case scenario, you got a pill (or a surgery) and it fixed one problem partially and created another. Or something else came up that wasn’t a problem before.
The thing about Western medicine is that it needs to give a name to what you’ve got to treat it. There are names for all kinds of strange, weird diseases, illnesses and malaises that people may have, usually called after the shrewd and selfless vicar of human suffering that discovered and described that specific combination of signs and symptoms and put their own personal signature on it for posterity. If you match the description, congratulations again! Really, why are you reading this? You have a name for your illness, and it can surely be treated, again, specific one problem, specific one solution.
Except, again, it doesn’t work like that. People have an annoying habit of not fitting the description. You might have something that resembles Mr. So-and-so’s disease, except that you don’t have symptom X and instead have problem Y along with it. Or it might look exactly like Kerfuffle’s Disease but the tests to verify that come back negative, or inconclusive. Back again you go to take some pills and see if it works, run more tests, etc. All the while, you continue to be ill whilst the doctors continue to be puzzled.
It’s this thing about names. Naming things gives us a sense of power over them. We know what it is, therefore that gives us a handle to control, overpower, defeat, own. Surely, if we know how to call it, then by the Universal power of language everyone and anyone who purports to know anything about curing illness must have a handle on this thing we’ve accurately named. I get that a lot in my practice.
“Can acupuncture help with [insert name of disease here]?” Or, even more insidiously, “what can acupuncture do to cure [insert name of disease here]?”
The answer, in almost all cases, is ‘it depends’.
I would invite you to read this blog post about the how the theories of Chinese Medicine view human beings and their problems. In an nutshell, the basic idea is that the body behaves for all practical intents and purposes as a natural ecosystem, perpetually self-correcting and swinging from one extreme to another, in cycles that range from the moment-to-moment variations in blood chemistry as the result of gas exchange in breathing, to the overall arc of a life, from birth, through stages of growth, development, maturation, ageing, and death. Sometimes, the pendulum swings too far in one direction and has trouble swinging back. Other times, it gets stuck and cannot swing at all. Along the way, all kinds of weird and wonderful changes can ensue.
This is the catch. Can we help with X or Y? Well, it depends on what underlying conditions in the patient’s life caused things to evolve into X or Y. Can we cure X or Y? Well, it depends on whether those conditions can be modified.
Because you are a very smart cookie, if you look at that last paragraph carefully, you’ll notice that the key operator in that train of thought is the underlying conditions that led to X or Y. It follows that what the actual disease is doesn’t really matter as much as how it came about. This is the real pearl of wisdom that those ancient Chinese shamans and healers from the past were really on about.
Because you see, each of us is different enough, both in terms of our unique makeup, ancestry, and genetics, on the one hand; and our life history, traumatic experiences, and current conditions on the other, that any illness or disease will, of necessity, reflect and be affected by them. This is why the one-size-fits-all, one-problem-one-solution approach of Western medicine often falls short of its promise. If we really wanted to name diseases after people, a more accurate and honest approach would be to name each person’s disease after them — it’s that unique.
Now, as unique as we all are, we are also very similar to each other. We all recognise each other as human: bipedal, two arms, two legs, one head, two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth… you get the idea. Internally, most of us are also grown out of the same basic building blocks and following mostly the same plan. More importantly for the purposes of the point I’m trying to make here, the basics of how our body-mind-emotions-spirit composite-aggregate emergent function cluster of consciousness and embodied experience (a.k.a. human body) operates are the same across the board. If a person were, say, knowledgeable about that, well, then, that person might be able to come at the problem of illness from the perspective of recognising and addressing deviations from that baseline.
This is what acupuncture can ‘do’ to help, well, everything.
It doesn’t matter what they told you your disease is called.
Whether or not any given disease, condition, illness or malaise can be cured is a different, more subtle question. Yet again, it depends on a host of factors: age, genetics, personal history, disease history, diet, lifestyle, sex life, relationships, what you watched on telly last week, and so on.
However, the basic, fundamental principle on which the practice of acupuncture is predicated on is the ability of the system to self-correct and find an optimal, functional balance that allows it to continue to operate as best as possible. This, acupuncture can always do. One might argue that ultimately, this is the only thing acupuncture does. The specifics of styles and treatment protocols are extrapolations of (and additions to) this basic principle.
So, can acupuncture help?
Yes it can. In the hands of a well-trained acupuncturist who understands the principles of acupuncture, it doesn’t matter what the disease is called: acupuncture works to address the underlying conditions that give rise to the problem, and help the body find ways to self-correct and move towards improved function, resourcefulness, and adaptability.
Perhaps the specific thing that you came for won’t stop being there, but we will dig as deep as we can to find the source of the imbalance and encourage your body to move in the direction it naturally wants to go, to balance it out. Remove the obstructions and the beaver dams and the river will naturally return to its cause.
There is one thing that acupuncture is particularly good at — pain. The reason for this is simple: pain is the body’s way to signal that something is not moving or behaving the way that it should. The pithy bit of Ancient Chinese Wisdom that every acupuncturist knows goes something like this: where there is movement, there is no pain; where there is pain, there is no movement. ‘Movement’ here refers broadly to the normal function and activity of the body. If we follow the line of reasoning above, i.e., that acupuncture is helping reestablish normal function, then it makes sense that by removing blockages and obstructions to that normal movement, the pain would go away.
According to some studies, acupuncture has a 95% rate of effectiveness in treating pain, regardless of origin or cause. Of course, if you are in severe, crippling pain, or if you fell down the stairs, or if there’s bits sticking out that shouldn’t be, or if it feels like an elephant is sitting on your chest, the acupuncturist probably shouldn’t be your first point of call. Seriously, go to the hospital if that’s the case. But, if you suffer from any kind of chronic pain, muscular pain, headaches, migraines, joint pain, abdominal pain, or weird wandering pains that seem to be all over and nowhere at once, chances are your body is having trouble moving inside and getting things done. Acupuncture can help with this, and your chances of it getting better are pretty good, if those studies are to be believed.
So next time you’re wondering if acupuncture can help with whatever, remember the answer is always the same. Come for a visit and be open to talk about as many aspects of your life as you’re comfortable with, so the acupuncturist knows as much as possible about who you are, and what is unique about what’s troubling you. Chances are, there is help to be had and changes to be made, but your body wants to heal — sometimes, it just needs a bit of help.
Give it a shot and you’ll see.
