What is Acupuncture

A Modern Ancient Healing System

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is a primary medical system that is one of the oldest healing methods on the planet for over 3500 years, helping prevent, heal, and manage health conditions.

The truth is that acupuncture improves your health and wellness in several ways. At first impression, it looks scary. Seeing needles sticking all over someone’s body would tend to make almost anyone think twice. But as uneasy as it may appear, it actually brings extraordinary healing to the body.

Acupuncture works under the principle that a flow of energy pulsating through the body, called qi, is fundamental to our health. The view is that disease is forced by an imbalance of qi, which can be corrected by inserting needles in particular body points. Through this method, pain is relieved, and good health is restored.

4 Key Principles

1. Your body is an integrated whole. Every structure in the body is integral and necessary as part of the whole. Together with mind, emotions, and spirit, the physical body structures form an extraordinarily complex interrelated system that is driven by an energy life force known as ‘chi.’

2. You are entirely connected to nature. Changes in nature are always reflected in our body. TCM factors in geographical location, the particular seasons, your age, genetics, even the time of day, and the condition of your body when looking at an individual’s health issues.

3. We are born with a natural self-healing ability. Our bodies are a microcosm that reflects the macrocosm. Like nature that has a regenerative capacity, so do we. Sometimes, this capability might appear to be missing or hard to access. It’s never really gone, just out of harmony and not working correctly.

4. Prevention is always the best cure. Our bodies are continually revealing signs about the condition of our health? We most of the time, we ignore these signs or symptoms until something more serious issue arises. TCM teaches how to interpret what your body is trying to tell you.

Five Element Acupuncture

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the five elements summarize the associations between the elements in nature and the life force, Qi that flows through them. The essential elements are fire, earth, metal, water, and wood. We are each blended with these five elements, and if we want to experience optimal health, these elements must be in perfect balance with each other. These five elements are always moving and shifting, each one dominating at different times in the natural cycle of life. The elements are applied to explain the physiology and pathologies in our bodies. Each element is linked to various organs, colors, flavors, senses, emotions, and even weather.

These Five Elements date back to 400 BC, and contrast to the more modern acupuncture method taught in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) today. TCM is the product of the standardization of Chinese medicine during the rise of communism in China in the late 1950s.

People today do not suffer from war, poverty, and famine to the same level as our ancestors. Instead, today most modern diseases and sicknesses come from stress, the stagnation of our minds, and the suppression of our emotions.

How Does Acupuncture Really Work?

Numerous individuals who have now experienced the healing effects of Acupuncture will vow that it indeed works. The familiar yet tricky question that follows is, “How does It Work?” There are two essential explanations to this question that must be considered.

Foremost, it works by stimulating the body’s own healing mechanisms, by creating a alert that goes directly to the brain and communicates something is wrong – and the brain responds by sending the appropriate restorative responders through your nerves, hormones, fascia, and gases.

Is Acupuncture Effective?

Acupuncture has been recognized worldwide for decades as an effective treatment for chronic pain and now many other conditions. Nevertheless, there is nothing magical about Acupuncture! Like other beneficial alternative treatments, Acupuncture works by activating the body’s own self-healing mechanisms to cure itself.

A Harvard study even found that Acupuncture was more effective for treating back and neck pain, osteoarthritis, chronic headache, and shoulder pain then Morphine. In light of the nationwide opioid crisis, doctors and patients are finally turning to Acupuncture more and more as a drug-free alternative to traditional pain management solutions.

Another research study published in the Archives of Internal
Medicine conducted by the National Institute of Health found that: “acupuncture outperformed treatments and standard care when used by people suffering from osteoarthritis, migraines and chronic back, neck and shoulder pain.” Even cancer patients have shown in studies to reduce treatment side effects, like chemotherapy-induced nausea and pain.