English Index Acupuncture & Health The Treatment FAQ Acupuncture points to post-op comfort Acupuncture At Work And Play Acupuncture Stops Sickness Surprising Acupuncture Side Effect H E A L T H: Acupuncture may help kids’ nasal allergies Acupuncture gets a face lift and much more Acupuncture for kids Acupuncture is effective against osteoarthritis Acupuncture aids relief for knee arthritis Energy of acupuncturist's needles may ease chronic pain Happy ever after Prozac? Scientific Support for Alternative Medicine Acupuncture Stops Sickness Acupuncture in Auckland Where Are We?

The Treatment

Acupuncture is not a one session treatment in chronic disorders. After the 5 to 2 treatments usually required to achieve the greatest amount of relief, some chronic diseases may require maintenance acupuncture every six to twelve months. Acute conditions may respond very well to acupuncture requiring one or very few treatments for cure.

Some three-quarters of the patient who are successfully treated notice a response at the first treatment, usually within seconds or minutes of the needle being inserted. Others will only notice this initial improvement after several hours or several days. The initial response is often heralded either by an increase of general energy and awareness, or by a feeling of pleasant, drowsy relaxation. As a rule, a depressed patient may observed that some of his symptoms have disappeared. But this may not last. It may wear off and the treatment then will have to be repeated.

Symptoms occasionally changes during the course of treatment, so that the patient may notice some he didn't have before. This is only a transient phase, and the symptoms disappears as the cure progresses.

In treating the more severe and chronic diseases, it often happens that a patient who has been relieved will notice after months or even a year a recurrence of symptoms. In most cases this can be successfully dealt with by one or two further treatments. With the more intractable diseases there may be several such recurrences, each as a rule milder than the last, and separated from it by a longer interval. Some failures in treatment are due to the patient failure to return for treatment when he notices a recurrence of symptoms.

Acupuncture is a natural way of healing, encouraging the body to heal itself. Side effects are rare and not permanent and in headache, some arthritic conditions and other disorders it is superior to modern drugs. In some disorders where the improvement is not marked, the relief of pain or other symptoms may be sufficient to allow the patient and the doctor to reduce the intake of drugs.

Prevention

This aspect of treatment is in some ways more important than the treatment of patient already ill.

In China, a doctor who could prevent disease was always considered the most skilful. The Chinese believes that most illnesses, particularly severe chronic ones, only occur if a part of the body is weakened. Only if this physiological weakness continues for a long time or is reinforced by some other factor does an actual disease occur.

The Chinese pulse diagnosis is able to detect mild weakness in the important organs of the body before symptoms occur. The patient is then treated and, because the malfunction has been caught at early stage, one treatment is usually enough to correct the imbalance and prevent the onset of symptoms. Up to the age of forty, one check-up a year is sufficient; over forty, every six months. In each cases a single treatment is, as a rule, all that is required.