Skip to content

Traditional Acupuncture in Bartlett, IL

book now

Uncategorized

Research Update: Acupuncture Relieves PTSD Symptoms After Natural Disaster

In April 2019, a team of Italian researchers published a study in Medical Acupuncture that suggests acupuncture may be effective for reducing symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after a natural disaster. The research team looked at residents of Amatrice, Italy, were a 6.0-magnitude earthquake in 2016 left nearly 300 people dead and almost 30,000 homeless. Natural hazards, like earthquakes, that are unpredictable and wreak widespread havoc on communities, have been shown to cause psychiatric disorders in survivors, including PTSD.

The participants in this study received five weeks of acupuncture treatments starting about a month after the earthquake. Researchers used patient-reported numbers on a pain scale to evaluate the effectiveness of the treatments. Before the treatments, 68 percent of the patients reported having psychological and pain symptoms associated with PTSD. Already after the third treatment, 54 percent of patients reported improvements in their psychological symptoms and 60 percent reported improvements in their pain symptoms. Using a statistical analysis, researchers measured a significant reduction between the initial reported psychological and pain scores and the scores after the third treatment. The researchers did not report any adverse side effects or events.

In the aftermath of natural disasters, communities are thrown into stress-provoking situations for myriad reasons, including loss of life, loss of property, loss of job, other economic losses, loss of community in the case some members move away and loss of infrastructure like schools or restaurants, among other things. Studies show individual mental health plays an important role in the success of communities rebuilding efforts after a natural disaster.

Although more research is needed to bolster the findings of this study, it suggests acupuncture can be an effective therapy for communities in the aftermath of a natural disaster. Studies show acupuncture is effective at balancing hormone levels that contribute to moderating stress levels in the body. The most significant body of research on acupuncture is in the field of acupuncture’s ability to reduce physical pain. This study suggests the effects of acupuncture extend to stress and pain brought on by a natural disaster.

 

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-04/mali–aed042319.php

 

The Yin and Yang of Back Pain

In Chinese medical theory, the most basic distinction between types of pain is whether they are due to ‘deficiency’ or ‘stagnation,’ both at the site of pain and systemically.

In this article, we’ll look at what deficiency pain means.

 

Deficiency Pain

 Deficiency refers to a lack of one or both of Qi and blood. Each of these can be deficient in a couple of ways themselves.

 

Qi deficiency.

A deficiency of Qi can be expressed as the inability of a muscle to fully contract and then relax, or as a functional pattern of imbalance due to neurological habituation.            

Neurological habituation causes a communication line between some part of the body and the brain to become weak. In this case, Qi can be seen as the impetus of nerve signaling and the ability of the tissue to communicate with its environment.

For example, when sitting at a desk, our bodies don’t generally demand the gluteus muscles to activate (we are just using them as cushions), so after a period of time our brains tend to ignore those muscles in favor of more actively used body parts such as the low back, hands and eyes. Over days, weeks and years of this pattern of inactivity, the neurological connection between our brain and our glutes becomes less robust, and it becomes more difficult to ‘fire’ those muscles when we really do need them, like when running.

This sets up a pattern of a different muscle activating (say, muscles of the low back) to try to perform functions which another muscle is best suited for (say, the glutes). This then leads to the overuse of the low back, but this overuse is actually due to a deficiency in another location. So pain might manifest in the low back or in the glutes (as a referral of pain from the tense low back), all because the original neurological signaling network has been compromised.   

Another type of Qi deficiency, the type disallowing the muscle to truly contract and then relax, is tied into general deficiency of the body tissues. This type of deficiency manifests as people age and the muscles become more tense by default, losing the full responsiveness, flexibility and easy range of motion that we experience as children.

           

Blood deficiency

Blood deficiency can be due to multiple factors as well, but the two main ideas are either lack of blood flow to the site of pain, or lack of proper oxygenation and nutrition within the blood to power the full potential of the tissues.

An inability of the blood to perfuse the site of pain is compounded by many factors. Some tissues naturally receive more blood than others. For example, skin and muscle tissue have many capillaries providing blood to the tissue, while tendons, ligaments, all kinds of connective tissue and bone often have very little access to fresh blood.

The Chinese medical theory of blood deficiency includes the inability to move the blood to the correct sites at the correct times, and a lack of energy to allow the blood to reach all of the tissues in an optimal way. This impacts the rate of recovery from daily stresses on the tissues. Over time, as these stresses do not repair, they initiate dysfunction and inflammation, which may irritate or impinge nearby nerves.

Once the blood flow has been compromised and pain sets in, the ability of the area to recover blood flow is directly related to how quickly the pain will dissipate and how long it will take to recover completely. The less blood flow, generally the longer the recovery time.

Deficiencies of the content of the blood are related to the function of the organ systems as well as dietary habit. Most famously, magnesium deficiency can cause muscle cramps, so athletes are often advised to eat things like bananas and avocados, fruits high in magnesium.

However, there are many nutrients necessary for optimal function of the musculoskeletal system. According to Chinese medical theory, the ability of the blood to deliver collagen-building material to the connective tissues is just as important as the ability of the blood to deliver magnesium to muscles. Both can lead to major pain if not carried out.

 

 

Stagnation Pain

Most of the stagnation-types of pain involve traumatic injury or a palpable-pathogenic process. This is an area where acupuncture and its associated modalities truly shine, treating traumatic injury such as fractures, sprains, infection of tissue and acute pain efficiently and gently. After an acute injury has been assessed by urgent or primary care, go to your acupuncturist for a complete plan of care for immediate physical recovery when other modalities such as physical therapy are not yet indicated.

 

1) Starting from the most superficial type of stagnation, Qi Stagnation involves a type of movement that becomes stuck. Most often it manifests as a tendency to have shoulder and neck pain due to stress which goes away with conscious relaxation and mild exercise. In this case, the muscle tissue itself has not yet been affected. The most common treatments for Qi stagnation involve stress-relieving acupuncture, trigger-point and motor point acupuncture, massage and exercises. Qi stagnation is a component of all the other types of stagnation as well.

 

2) The next level of stagnation involves the blood. A common example of Blood Stagnation is a muscle that has been tense and has formed a series of knots in the tissue, disallowing the full relaxation of the muscle, often present in low back and shoulder muscles. Blood stagnation is treated with strong local acupuncture, cupping and gua sha to physically move the blood. It often presents in combination with heat, cold, damp and phlegm stagnation.

 

3) Heat is part of the inflammatory process, along with redness, swelling and pain. Heat stagnation can be a secondary effect of lingering blood stagnation that starts to become inflamed, or it can be a rapid onset inflammation or infection. Heat stagnation is treated with cooling techniques, using acupuncture distally to relieve heat and inflammation while applying cooling herbal poultices and/or liniments topically. Internal herbs can be used to treat infection and inflammation concurrently. Heat is often combined with damp and blood stagnation.

 

4) Cold Stagnation can either have a fast or a slow origin of onset, with the fast type of onset a physical exposure to cold causing the tissues to tense and the local cellular metabolism to slow down. This causes sharp stabbing pains similar to muscle cramps, accompanied by a deep ache. This can be seen with low back pain after a long bike ride with the low back improperly covered, riding through a cold and rainy environment. Cold stagnation is treated with warming topical liniments and poultices as well as heat packs and moxibustion combined with acupuncture to relax and warm the area. Cold stagnation is often combined with blood or phlegm stagnation.

 

5) Damp Stagnation involves swelling that is still soft, as in the puffiness after a sprain or around a repetitive-motion injury. This can be found around the shoulder blades from overuse of the arms or across the whole low back after intense physical labor. Dampness is treated with cupping, heat poultices, local acupuncture and constitutional body points for eliminating dampness.

 

6) The most bizarre and deep-seated type is Phlegm Stagnation: a type of hard nodule or mass the center of a deep bruise, a fatty lipoma, or the swelling of vertebrae involved in arthritis. Blood and Qi stagnation must both exist prior to the formation of phlegm stagnation. This potentially takes the longest to resolve due to the need to diminish the tissue accumulation. Strong local acupuncture, plum-blossom acupuncture, cupping, gua sha, moxibustion and topical plasters and soaks are all used to treat this more difficult type of stagnation.

 

These six types of stagnation interact with each other and change over the course of an injury or illness.

Neck and Shoulder Pain Related to the Small Intestine

The Small Intestine type of neck, shoulder and jaw pain is caused by stagnant QI (vital energy) and Blood along the energetic channel of the Small Intestine. This is caused by physical or mental/emotional imbalances in the Heart and Small Intestine. Poor sleep, digestive problems, sadness, inability to let go of harmful states of mind, poor body posture, and repetitive movements due to work or sports are among the most common reasons causing imbalances in the Small Intestine channel. 

Acupuncture, cupping and guasha are very effective in relieving muscle tension and pain, relaxing the mind, and improving sleep quality. 

If you think you are suffering from muscle tension and pain associated with Small Intestine and want to learn more about how acupuncture and Chinese medicine can help you, give us a call or schedule your free consultation online. 

5 Myths About Acupuncture You Should Stop Believing Right Now

Acupuncture is part of a medical system known as Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) that has been around for nearly 3,000 years. The practice uses hair-thin needles to stimulate acupressure points, specific points on the body that regulate the flow of energy through pathways called meridians. The free and balanced flow of this energy, or Qi, dispels pain and illness from the body, according to TCM. For many years in the Western world, in fact for most of the 3,000 years acupuncture has existed, people have been sceptical about placing their faith in a medical system that looks at energy pathways instead of veins.

Today, a growing body of research on acupuncture is going a long way to prove the efficacy of acupuncture for a variety of afflictions, and the practice is growing in popularity. If you’re one of those people still on the fence, take a closer look at these five prevailing myths about acupuncture before deciding it’s not for you.

 

Myth one: Acupuncture is painful.

It’s understandable to think being pricked with multiple needles will be painful or at least uncomfortable. In the West, our experience with needles is primarily through getting shots with hypodermic needles. Those needs are significantly larger than acupuncture needles, which are only about twice the diameter of a human hair. Acupuncture needles are also extremely flexible and can bend to a 90-degree angle without breaking. Rather than pain, most patients report a vague numbness, heaviness, tingling or dull ache around where the needles are inserted.

 

Myth two: Acupuncture only works to treat pain.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. In Asia, acupuncture is used to treat just about everything, and stateside, research is showing it alleviates a multitude of ailments. Acupuncture has been shown to help everything from allergies to arthritis. Some hospitals are now offering acupuncture to help alleviate stress and anxiety in the emergency room, and the U.S. military is using acupuncture on the battlefield to help with PTSD.

 

Myth three: Acupuncture doesn’t really work: it’s just a placebo effect

Over the past decade, scientific studies have come a long way in disproving this claim. Most studies today test the efficacy of acupuncture treatments by performing true acupuncture on a portion of the study participants and sham acupuncture on another group. The sham acupuncture, placing needles in people at random points rather than known acupoints, is meant to test the strength of the placebo effect in acupuncture. Several studies have found that while people in both groups report some change (pain relief, less nausea etc. depending on the study), the group that receives true acupuncture consistently reports more significant change, for a longer period of time, and system-wide change rather than just localized effects where the needles are inserted. In May 2018, the Journal of Pain published a study that looked at acupuncture and chronic pain using data from nearly 21,000 patients. In their study, patients who received sham acupuncture did not see significant changes in their pain whereas the group that received true acupuncture did, adding to the body of evidence showing acupuncture cannot be explained away by the placebo effect.

 

Myth four: Acupuncture works miracles: it only takes a couple needles to cure you

The truth is that acupuncture works on a cumulative basis, just like building muscle or losing fat by going to the gym. You can’t expect to go to the gym once and look like Dwayne Johnson. It takes time. And depending on how long you’ve been dealing with your ailment, it may take quite a bit of time and multiple treatments. There are no instant fixes when it comes to health.

 

Myth five: Acupuncture is expensive

This all depends on the practitioner, the type of acupuncture being performed and whether or not you use insurance. Practitioners sometimes offer sliding scale pricing. Community style acupuncture, typically performed in an open setting with the practitioner treating multiple people at once, is quite affordable. And, as more and more insurance policies start to cover acupuncture, it is becoming more accessible to more people.

 

(630) 837-4241 Directions Contact/Schedule