Acupuncture: Everything you need to know

What is acupuncture ?

Acupuncture is the stimulation of various points of the body using needles, heat, or pressure to bring about relief of a huge range of ailments. It is a key component of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), which has been used for over 3000 years by millions of people to either help with ailments or as a way of maintaining health.

TCM takes a whole body approach to health, meaning it strives to balance the whole body's ability to monitor, regulate and heal itself, physically and emotionally. TCM has a range of diagnostic tools at its disposal, which include pulse diagnosis, tongue diagnosis and facial reading. The information from these examinations and others are correlated into various patterns of disease, from where a treatment for the whole body is formulated. This may sound complicated for what may seem a simple condition, but let me show you an example of how it works.

An example:

A person comes in for treatment for backache. I could put some needles into the affected region, manipulate the needles, and would more than likely have a good results after a course of treatments (after all, that is the treatment you would get if you saw an NHS acupuncturist). However, there are a number of possible causes for the backache, and a good TCM practitioner will want to find what the cause of the backache could be. The most obvious would be trauma, a slip or over- exertion, etc. The "stick a few needles in and manipulate" method would probably work well in this case, if the person was healthy in every other way, and showed no unusual patterns of disease.

However, if upon examination, the person has had the backache for a while, urinates more than usual, feels cold in the back, has tinnitis (a whistling or buzzing sound in the ears), and is often anxious, then the indications would be of a pattern involving the Kidney meridian.
Or if the same person was prone to aches and pains in various joints, had reddish eyes, suffered headaches/migraines, had red areas on the sides of the tongue and was often angry (or suppresses anger), then they would need extra treatments in the Liver channel.

Or if the same person had weak muscles, poor digestion and worried a lot, they would require extra treatment in the Spleen channel to help with the digestion that would support better musculature.

Or if the same person had backache that extended down the back of the legs, then the Bladder channel would require work to clear that also.

Or if the same pain was down the outside of the leg, then it's the Gallbladder channel that needs work.

Or the person has a palpable feeling of heat in the affected area, then treatment is needed to remove this heat.

Or  a feeling of cold in the back? The person would probably need moxibustion (a warming therapy shown on the right).

So, as you can see, a backache isn't always just a backache. It is the same with every symptom or illness. There is a cause and effect, or Ben & Biao as the Chinese call it, which translates as Root & Branch. The root of the problem must be addressed to help prevent reoccurrence.
 
This unique pattern of diagnosis is fundamental to a good TCM acupuncturist's treatment protocol, and is priceless in its ability to treat the underlying causes, and which would possibly alleviate other problems for which you hadn't sought treatment. 

A good acupuncturist won't just treat the symptoms, he will aim to treat the causes of the symptoms.