5 Reasons You Should Try Acupuncture Right Now

In the West, acupuncture is still sometimes dismissed — even as more western doctors are incorporating the practice into their treatment plans. Nonetheless, acupuncture is becoming increasingly recognized as an effective treatment for relieving pain, easing stress and even combating insomnia. And in the right hands, acupuncture can also be used to treat a wide array of other symptoms and disorders — as it has been in China and many other countries for centuries.

There is nothing magical or superstitious about it. A doctor's office in Shanghai or Hong Kong is not so different from what you'd find in the United States. What is different however, is that acupuncture is a highly respected and frequently used modality for a range of health and medical conditions.

As practitioners and patients in Asia know quite well, the benefits of acupuncture extend much farther, into areas that might even surprise you. Here are five reasons why acupuncture could soon go mainstream as a form of treatment:

1. Allergies

While Western medicine focuses on treating the uncomfortable symptoms of allergies, Traditional Chinese Medicine — using a combination of acupuncture and herbal treatments — treats the whole person from the inside out. This approach works not only to treat the acute symptoms felt during an allergic reaction, but to regulate the immune system. A healthy functioning immune system will improve an individual's health overall, and reduce the severity and frequency of symptoms.

2. Weight Loss

The inability to achieve a healthy weight can be one of the most stubborn problems patients face, and part of the problem lies in the hypothalamus — the part of the brain that regulates hunger, among other things. Acupuncture can be used to stimulate the hypothalamus, quieting its hunger signals and normalizing appetite. And because acupuncture also relieves stress, it inhibits "stress-eating" and rids the body of fat-storing stress hormones like cortisol.

3. Chemotherapy Side-Effects

Chemotherapy uses drugs to inhibit the growth of cancer cells, a critically important action in fighting cancer. But its side effects — nausea, sore joints, dry mouth, hot flashes and fatigue — are tough on the patient. Acupuncture and electro-acupuncture work to activate chemicals in the brain that block pain. This creates relaxing, pleasurable sensations that can provide much-needed relief for patientsundergoing treatment. Patients can also choose acupressure and cold laser acupuncture, which achieve similar results without the use of needles.

4. Infertility

When the body's physiological systems are impaired by stress, or when neurological connectivity is unbalanced and hormones are being triggered in unhealthy ways, infertility can result. Frustratingly, modern fertility treatments are often hampered by these underlying issues. Acupuncture works to help reset neurological circuits. This can reduce hormonal imbalances and overall stress, and boosts the efficacy of fertility treatments.

5. Smoking Cessation

Nicotine is highly addictive, and the symptoms provoked by quitting smoking include intense cravings, irritability, anxiety, poor sleep, headache, increased appetite, fatigue and difficulty concentrating.

Western aids like the nicotine patch merely delay the onset of symptoms. True relief and success in quitting are possible through the use of acupuncture, which can reduce cravings and alleviate withdrawal symptoms. When you add stress relief to the process, quitting smoking can become easier and totally possible. A qualified practitioner will also provide personalized exercise and dietary recommendations, herbal supplements and an analysis of your triggers for smoking and how to avoid them.

Acupuncture has countless applications for patient health. When combined with other modalities from Traditional Chinese Medicine, or in an integrated fashion with western medicine, the results can be highly effective. This ancient discipline treats the whole person, restoring balance, strengthening immunity and helping physiological systems thrive.

This article originally appeared on mindbodygreen.com and was written by Dr. Daniel Hsu

Emergency doctors are using Acupuncture to treat pain, now here’s the evidence

Emergency medicine is not all about life and death situations and high-tech solutions. Our study, the largest of its kind in the world, shows using acupuncture in the emergency department can relieve acute pain.

The study, published today in the Medical Journal of Australia, finds acupuncture is as effective as medication in treating pain for lower back pain and ankle sprain. But it took more than an hour for either to provide adequate pain relief.

Our study builds on previous research to show the effectiveness of acupuncture to treat chronic (long-term) pain.

Yet, there are several barriers to using acupuncture routinely in emergency departments.

What is acupuncture and who practices it?

Using acupuncture to relieve pain involves placing needles in various parts of the body to stimulate the release of endorphins and other neurochemicals, which can act as the body’s naturally occurring pain relievers.

For generations various cultures around the world have used acupuncture to treat multiple conditions, including providing pain relief. And in Australia, it is reimbursed through the Medicare Benefits Schedule when administered by a medical doctor.

Further reading: Modern acupuncture: panacea or placebo?

Acupuncture is one of the most accepted forms of complementary medicine among Australian general practitioners. It also appears in treatment guidelines for doctors in how to manage pain.

Why we ran the study and what we did

Anecdotally, we were aware that several emergency department doctors, in both public and private hospitals in Australia, were treating patients’ pain with acupuncture. But until this large federally-funded study, no-one had set up a trial like it to show how effective it was.

Our trial was an “equivalence” study, which means we aimed to see if the different treatments were equivalent rather than seeing if they were better than placebo. We did this as it would not be ethical to give a placebo to people coming to an emergency department for pain relief.

So, we randomly assigned more than 500 patients to receive standard painkillers, standard painkillers plus acupuncture, or acupuncture alone when they presented with back pain, migraine or ankle sprain at four Melbourne hospitals (some private, some public). While the patients knew which treatment they had, the researchers involved in assessing their pain didn’t (known as a single-blind study).

The type of acupuncture we used included applying needles at specific points on the body for each condition, as well as along points chosen by the treating acupuncturist. This was to reflect what would happen during regular clinical practice.

Doctors who were also qualified medical acupuncturists and practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine (registered in Victoria with the Chinese Medicine Registration Board of Australia) performed the acupuncture.

After treatment, we assessed patients’ pain after an hour, and every hour until discharge. We also rang them for an update 24-48 hours after being discharged.

What we found

We found acupuncture, either alone or with painkillers, was equivalent to drugs-alone in providing pain relief for lower back pain, ankle sprain, but not for migraine.

When patients looked back on their treatment, the vast majority (around 80%) were satisfied with their treatment regardless of which treatment they had.

However, no treatment provided good pain relief until after the first hour.

What are the implications?

Our findings suggest acupuncture may be a viable option for patients who come to the emergency department for pain relief. This is especially important for those who cannot or choose not to have analgesic drugs.

This is also an important finding in light of the potential for side effects and abuse with opioid analgesics, which might otherwise be used to relieve pain in the emergency department.

Previous research shows using acupuncture to treat chronic pain is comparable to morphine, is safer and doesn’t lead to dependence. Our findings suggest acupuncture also has a role in treating acute pain.

However, our research raises several issues, not only about conducting such research but also in implementing our findings in practice.

We had to overcome many ethical, policy and regulatory issues before we started. These included issues around the qualifications of medical and non-medical acupuncturists and employing traditional Chinese medicine practitioners to deliver acupuncture in a western medical hospital.

And to more widely implement our findings, we need to discuss the type of practitioners best placed to deliver acupuncture in hospital, what type of training they need to work in the emergency department and what type of conditions they should treat.

Hopefully, our study will spark further research to address these issues and lead to the development of safe and effective protocols for acute pain relief that may involve combining both modern and ancient forms of medicine to achieve rapid and effective analgesia for all emergency department patients.

This article originally appeared on theconversation.com

Carpal Tunnel Pain and How Acupuncture Helps

If you see someone wearing a wrist splint, it's likely due to carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS). Many attribute the rise of CTS to poor computer ergonomics or uncomfortable body positioning for long hours.

Symptoms include hand weakness, numbness and/or tingling of thumb and fingers except the little finger, and pain from the wrist area throughout the palm side of your forearm.

The carpal tunnel is a tube bound by bones and ligaments in the wrist area on the palm side of the hand. It is roughly the diameter of the thumb, and it houses and channels the median nerve, veins, and tendons for hand and finger mobility.

Whether by physical forces or injury compressing the carpal tunnel or by internal neurological inflammation or damage, CTS amounts to a pinched median nerve, blood vessel, or tendon damage in the carpal tunnel.

Although similar symptoms to CTS may arise from different types of work with arms and hands poorly positioned, if those symptoms dissipate quickly and easily it's probably not CTS, at least it's not serious.

Simply taking breaks, and shaking your arms and hands, then re-positioning your hands, arms, and general posture better should keep you from needing medical intervention.

But if the symptoms persist away from the job or after long hours of typing, you should seek medical attention.
 

Conventional modalities of medical attention

Conventional medicine offers adjustable splints that can be taken off and on at will. Many CTS sufferers wear them during work, but wearing the splint during sleep is also recommended.

Non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are usually recommended. Some have to be prescribed while others can be purchased over the counter (OTC). These only relieve pain with side effects. Sometimes cortisone injections are used to relieve the pressure from swelling on the median nerve.

If these don't help enough, surgery is used. Endoscopic surgery, involving a narrow tube inserted into small incisions, is the least invasive. It's sometimes used for injured knees. Open surgery, as the name implies, is the most invasive, requiring more anesthesia.
 

Acupuncture - A non-pharmaceutical, non-surgical CTS intervention

Acupuncture, which works on the energy (chi) distribution along the body's mapped out meridians, has been used for centuries for both optimizing good health and reversing bad health, acute or chronic.

Lately, acupuncture has been used successfully for healing maladies from sports injuries. A dramatic example occurred just before the Super Bowl in 1986 when Chicago Bears controversial quarterback Jim McMahon underwent acupuncture treatments for a severely bruised back that wasn't responding to conventional treatment.

After his acupuncture treatments, Jim said he felt 200 percent better, and he and the Bears blew out the Patriots in that Super Bowl. This news event raised eyebrows among classic medical skeptics, spiking acupuncture's burgeoning public acceptance in America.

A recent acupuncture for CTS study by an Iranian university's neurological department was published in January 2012's Journal of Research in Medical Sciences as "Acupuncture in treatment of carpal tunnel syndrome: A randomized controlled trial study."

64 sufferers of moderate CTS were divided into a control group receiving vitamins B1 and B6 with fake acupuncture. The other group received two acupuncture treatments weekly over a four week period and wore wrist splints nightly.

Guess which group tested better neurologically and had lower GSS (global symptom scores) reported for pain, weakness, tingling, and numbness. Yep, the acupuncture guys, of course.

The researchers concluded: "Our findings indicated that the acupuncture can improve the overall subjective symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome and could be adopted in comprehensive care programs of these patients."

The complete study report is available in the sources below.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/carpal-tunnel-syndrome/DS00326

http://www.apnewsarchive.com

http://www.vitasearch.com/get-clp-summary/40537

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3523426/

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/038939_carpal_tunnel_acupuncture_treatment.html#ixzz40PI0IGZe