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Pain Management

Acupuncture & Pain

Medical Disclaimer: The information and advice published or made available through this website is NOT intended to replace the services of a physician or a health care professional acting under a physician’s supervision, nor does it constitute a doctor-patient relationship which has been established by an in-person evaluation of a patient.

Acupuncture has been used in Asia for thousands of years to treat many conditions and relieve pain. It’s now being used in many other Western countries to ease everything from low back pain to nerve pain such as painful shingles rashes, to headaches, fibromyalgia, menstrual cramps, and more.

Acupuncture involves the insertion of extremely fine needles into the skin at specific Acupoints. This may relieve pain by releasing endorphins, the body’s natural pain-killing chemicals, and by affecting the part of the brain that governs serotonin, a brain chemical involved with mood.

During an acupuncture practice, the acupuncturist may turn or twirl the needles slightly or apply heat or electrical stimulation to enhance the effects. He or she may also burn a therapeutic herb near the skin; this is called moxibustion. An acupuncturist typically inserts six to fifteen needles and leaves them in place for ten to forty minutes while the patient rests. A usual course of the treatment depends on how severe the patient’s condition is.

Frequency of the treatments always depends on individual patients: the acute cases may require two acupuncture treatments a day, whereas it could be one to three times a week for patients with chronic conditions.

Acupuncture is generally quite safe, and the complication rate appears to be quite low. A review of acupuncture-related complications reported in medical journals found that the most serious problem was accidental insertion of a needle into the pleural space between the lungs and the chest wall (but this is Very rare). The advent of single-use, sealed needle packages has all but eliminated the risks of blood-borne infections such as hepatitis B or HIV.

TCM Point of View

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), the meridians in our body are inter-outer connected with all our organs. Hence, each meridian corresponds to specific organs, and is named accordingly: Hand TaiYin Lung Meridian, Foot YangMing Large Intestine Meridian

Meridians are the outward manifestation of internal balance, and disorders in meridians could later display in the respective organs, which dictates the diagnosis based on this relationship between meridians and organs to be one of the most important aspects of TCM.

TCM is a holistic medicine, as our body itself is a small universe that’s holistically connected with big universe (Need to clarify further). In TCM, we see the pain in two different points of view: “When there is a blockage, there is a Pain.” “When there is a Malnourishment, there is a Pain.” Masterful doctors and acupuncturists take their patients’ Body-Mind-Spirit status into a careful consideration in order to find what is causing disorders in the patient, and treat him or her accordingly. This is why two patients with the exact same conditions may be treated differently. Pain is the sign on our own body through meridians or acupoints, which represents a state of unbalance, and/or blockage in our body.