Adding Acupuncture to your wellness regime

Types of Acupuncture

What does Acupuncture treat, and how effective is it?

The common feature shared by all the different types of acupuncture is using needles to make lesions in soft tissue (acupuncture). Needles and needle-induced lesions activate the built-in survival mechanisms that normalize homeostasis and promote self-healing.

This process consists of two parts: central and peripheral. For the central mechanism needling and needle-induced lesions stimulate parts of the brain that activate the principal survival systems-the nervous, endocrine, immune, and cardio-vascular systems-and normalize the physiological activities of the whole body.

In the case of the peripheral mechanism needling and the resulting lesions trigger physiological reactions around the needling sites that involve all four survival systems in desensitizing and repairing the damaged tissues. At the needling site, a cascade of survival reactions occurs, including the immune reaction, and we call this the local needling reaction.

Thus acupuncture can be defined as a physiological therapy coordinated by the brain which responds to the stimulation of manual or electrical needling of peripheral sensory nerves. In relation to this definition, there is one concept that can not be over emphasized: that acupuncture does not treat any particular pathological symptom but normalizes physiological homeostasis and promotes self healing.

Thus acupuncture, in terms of it’s therapeutic mechanisms, is non-specific: acupuncture does not target any particular symptom or disease but treats the body as a whole. Understanding this non-specific nature of acupuncture can provide an answer to puzzling question: what symptoms and diseases can it treat?

Acupuncture can be used to treat:

• Chronic Pain
• Acute Pain
• Neck and Arm Pain
• Back and Leg Pain
• Knee and Shoulder Pain
• Sciatica
• Sports and Golf Injuries
• Headaches
• Migraines
• Whiplash