Acupuncture

Acupuncture works by releasing the body’s neurotransmitters to put the body in a state of calm. The needles signal through the skin to the brain, causing the body to relax.

Many people are surprised to see their progress after several weeks of treatment. Of course, acupuncture has an immediate effect on the body and can bring you to levels of calm that you never thought possible. However, the most profound effects occur after several weeks of treatments and helps the nervous system restore its natural relaxation response again. The relaxation response tends to get frayed and disintegrate as the stresses of daily living take its toll on the body. “Toning” your nervous system to recapture and restore the relaxation response is where the magic occurs and becomes more “toned” as your nervous system. You might see subtle signs of not “flying off of the handle" as much, being calmer during your working hours, or coming down from stress quicker than you used to. It trains the body to relax deeper, just as day-to-day stress causes you to spiral higher and higher into anxiousness or your stress-related conditions.

When I see people coming in for anxiety and stress treatments, I will ask where that person holds the most stress. Most likely it is in the shoulders, neck, glutes or jaw. If I target a painful area along with the stress treatment, I get better results because everything is connected. Clearing tight areas help me to get the person to relax better, both physically and mentally.

Aging occurs when blood flow to an organ becomes sluggish, absent or inflamed. We tend to understand this when it comes to heart function and the risk of stroke and cholesterol. But this can happen to other organs in your body. Somewhere in your body, there are one or more organs that are either too hyper or too weak. Typically in a “healthy” person there are one or more organs that are not functioning optimally. Stress of daily living, poor diet, poor sleeping habits for example, drives the body to work very hard and eventually slows down from exhaustion. This stress response can always be traced back to an organ system not working well. Some organs get weak while others get hyperactive and others get totally blocked and sluggish. What this means is that there is a lot NOT going on properly with blood flow oxygenating organ function. This in turn causes you to feel more stressed, more tired, and more burned out. Here’s why no one gets this concept! People think organ function and they think you need surgery. But there is a second way of understanding this. As we age, blood flow gets worse! If blood flow gets worse, then your body gets less blood flow to the organs. It is the organs that are on the receiving end of all of this necessary blood flow. Less and less blood flow over years may not cause any “major health” problems, but it is subtle and insidious. This is when you really feel your “age” and that you can’t do what you did when you were younger. Culture calls this “getting old” Chinese medicine says “wait this is poor blood flow”. So if you enhance blood flow to specific organs that are weak, then you can “rehab” the organ system and its functioning appropriate for your age.

Treating the cause of the anxiety yields better results than just doing symptomatic treatment: In addition to treating the stress symptoms, acupuncturists’ try to find out what your “pattern of disharmony” is. Treating the organ dysfunction with acupuncture, supplements, herbs, and diet and lifestyle is critical for making any lasting changes to the condition. This is truly how we can make a big difference in the lives of many people that I’ve seen throughout the years.