Acupuncture
You can read about all the technical stuff elsewhere…there are tons of books & now info on the web. Since the turn of the century Acupuncture is considered ok even by much of establishment medicine, though I don’t really care about that as the reason people come to see me is because Acupuncture has helped them or someone they know. WHAT CAN ACUPUNCTURE HELP ? My heart sinks when I see those lists of diseases… like the ones you see in high street stores… Asthma, Allergies, Aardvark disease, Bell’s palsy, Bupa sickness…… right through to Zinusitis. And of course…. ‘LOSE WEIGHT with Acupuncture ‘…… if only. ** Actually its fine for someone to come because they’ve heard acupuncture can help their sinus congestion. It’s true, it can usually, and you don’t need to accept some weird theory that says your energy circulates out of your navel and up your left nostril. But it’s also true that classical acupuncture theory considers the flow of ‘qi’ energy through the body and has developed a sophisticated theory based on this flow of qi and really when we use this model of acupuncture we’re looking at how that ‘disease’ state has arisen……what went wrong so that something else went wrong, so that something else went wrong etc etc until you ended up with all that gloop up your nose. I suppose that’s what people mean when they say ‘you treat the whole body don’t you…’ although I think that’s a little bit ambitious. If you can get part way towards such a laudable goal you’re doing well. All the way there and you’re at least a minor deity. ** actually you may use acupuncture to help if the digestive process is poor for example leading to the more efficient use of food, but weight loss invariably involves far more complex issues not least diet & exercise. But we always want the simple fix. So if you want to come and see me for weight loss, please don’t. SO HOW DOES IT WORK THEN ? People coming for acupuncture often say ‘this is going to unblock my energy isn’t it’. Like unblocking the drains, a sudden gurgling noise then you’re fine.But again, look at the model I mentioned above. Don’t worry about whether qi exists like the blood in your veins. If we can use this way of seeing the body to understand an illness And the understanding gives a ‘diagnosis’ in chinese medicine terms And the diagnosis leads to a selection of acupuncture points And the acupuncture achieves a statistically significant number of cures Then we have a consistent system. For precedent, some very heavyweight science sometimes uses ‘theoretical’ models to explain things (look at the Michelson Morley experiment to measure the speed of the Earth through the ‘ether’ – there’s loads about it on the internet). Actually when you do acupuncture, you get so many examples of putting a needle in one place and it affecting another area, according to the classic acupuncture wiring diagram, that you start to realise there’s something which can’t be explained through the static model of anatomy & physiology gained over the last hundred years or so through the dissection of dead bodies. So ‘Qi flowing in meridians’ is fine by me. BUT IS IT SCIENCE ?There’s some good stuff recently using MRI scans (McPherson et al, University of York) that’s shown how areas of the limbic system light up when certain acupuncture points are needled. Briefly, this area goes on to connect with our control systems, so there’s a means of ‘regulation’ with acupuncture. This is consistent with the fact that acupuncture is often good at problems of regulation and control. For musculo-skeletal problems you can also explain the action of needles in muscles quite simply. In the case of myofascial ‘trigger points’ the needle in the problem area of the muscle generates local electrical activity in cells which normalises the structure of the muscle, stopping the pain generation and restoring the normal length to the muscle. But even here, you often achieve better results by using classical acupuncture points also. WHAT ABOUT THE CHEMICALS ? Endorphins are a complex group of neuropeptides, glibly cited as the reason for the pain relieving effect of some acupuncture. Actually they probably are involved in the general response to needling sometimes, but the very ‘targeted’ effect of acupuncture on pain can’t be down to such a generalised response; endorphins would be released and affect pain wherever it was, but in fact the pain relief happens either because you’ve fixed the problem causing the pain, or because it’s in the ‘target’ area of the meridian or acupuncture point. The endorphin explanation is usually down to the attempts of lazy thinking to trivialize acupuncture.
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