Timeless Medicine || Healing from Within

Within landscapes there are rivers, mountains, valleys, and the great open sky. Occasionally things get clogged either from a flood, a damn backing up waterways, or perhaps a hot summer brings dry land and dusty air. The environment is out of balance. Sometimes it is able to rectify and regain equilibrium on its own, but sometimes it needs a little assistance to get back on track.

This also happens in the human landscape. We experience droughts and storms as pain, irritability, sadness, infertility, rashes, and a whole host of other manifestations. Acupuncture provides a way to help our ecosystem to recoup and supports our natural energy dynamic to regain balance. Perhaps most importantly, it helps create an environment that is better suited to manage any abrupt pattern changes in the atmosphere when used as a preventative measure. 

The tools for acupuncture are sterile hair-fine needles. From the Chinese medicine perspective, these are placed at strategic points along the body’s meridian system of subtle energy channels. In acupuncture terms, the needles help to regulate qi, pronounced “chee”, which is our life-force energy. The channels all have a relationship to one another and follow patterns of response that can be mapped out between seemingly unrelated symptoms. For instance, someone with chronic sinusitis may not realize that their system is responding to the food they eat which is actually the root cause of their condition, so it is what they are eating, not what they are breathing that is the culprit.

Western medicine finds that there are particular groupings of nerve bundles at these acupuncture point sites that produce strong effects in the nervous system when stimulated. This is primarily happening along the largest system in our body, the fascia or connective tissue. These points communicate with each other and activate the body’s natural immune response. They can reinvigorate the healing cascade to produce healthy blood flow to the diseased or injured area. When activated, the increase in blood flow brings with it all the healing elements like oxygen, white blood cells, and analgesics allowing the body to heal. 

In acupuncture and all the oriental medicine modalities, a treatment protocol is designed by taking the whole person, or "landscape," into consideration, rather than only the part experiencing suffering. Many people feel an immediate sense of calm, relaxation, and wholeness when receiving acupuncture. The effects for pain relief, mood stability, weight loss, and release of addictions among many other issues are significant and long lasting for both acute and chronic conditions.

Often a series of treatments is necessary in the beginning to support a significant change in the signals your body is receiving, like physical therapy for your nervous system. Once your main complaint has been addressed and your system is self regulating once again, then treatments become fewer and further between. Some people use acupuncture and its related techniques for a quick restoration to their system while others will continue with monthly or bi-monthly treatments for regular preventative care.