Introducing Acupuncture

In this day and age, most people have already heard of acupuncture and maybe you’ve even tried it for back pain or fertility enhancement. An important part of the Chinese health care system, Acupuncture can be traced over 2,500 years. Its theory is based on the premise that there are patterns of energy flow (Qi) through the body that are essential for health and when disturbed, this flow is believed to contribute to the development of disease. In American medicine, the practice of acupuncture to treat identifiable disease was rare until President Nixon visited China in 1972, after which there was a big jump in interest in the US and Europe in applying the technique to Western medicine.
So what exactly is acupuncture and how does it work? Technically speaking, acupuncture is a series of procedures involving stimulation of points or places on the skin with hair-thin needles; specifically penetration of the skin by thin, solid, metallic needles, which are manipulated manually or by electrical stimulation. But don’t worry-though the word needle sounds scary, the insertion is hardly felt and almost never painful. The different approaches to diagnosis and treatment in American acupuncture incorporate medical traditions from China, Japan, Korea, and other countries.
Acupuncture as a therapeutic intervention is widely practiced in the US and there have even been studies on the practice and its potential usefulness in a variety of conditions. Of course study design has been an issue in some of these studies and the issue is further complicated by inherent difficulties in the use of proper controls, such as placebo and sham acupuncture groups. Some studies have shown promising results in acupuncture’s use in adult post-operative and chemotherapy nausea and vomiting and in post-operative dental pain plus  to help people quit smoking, to treat lower back pain, to treat osteoarthritis pain, to rehabilitate after a stroke, and to provide pain relief from headaches, menstrual cramps, tennis elbow, fibromyalgia, myofascial pain, osteoarthritis,  carpal tunnel syndrome, and asthma where acupuncture may be useful as an adjunct treatment or one to be included in a comprehensive management program.