The purpose of Chinese medicine is not to compete with Western medicine but to complement and complete it. The advanced technologies of Western medicine explain how disease affects the body. The exceptional observational techniques of Chinese medicine explain why disease invades the body.
How Acupuncture Works
According to Chinese medicine, there are energetic pathways, or channels, throughout the body that influence associated internal organs and structures. Energy from these pathways surfaces at various points on the body, identified as acupuncture points. Each of these acupuncture points serves as a tunnel, or access route, to the deeper circulatory channels within. Acupuncture stimulates a selection of specific points, thereby activating the body’s natural healing abilities.
Acupuncture’s Approach to Pain
Chinese Medicine makes a distinction between different types of pain: emotional pain, physical pain and traumatic pain. These three different types of pain have different origins, different manifestations, and thus varying treatment procedures.
1. Emotional Pain – Emotional pain, psychological pain or mental pain can be defined as the type of pain experienced with the death of a relative or close friend or long-term mental psychological trauma due to illness, family, job issues or any long-term stressor. Chinese medicine defines seven psychological entities: anger, excessive joy, worry, sadness, fear, complaining, and crying. The acupuncture treatments used for these seven problems come from the Da Cheng, a classical Chinese text written several thousand years ago.
2. Physical Pain – There is a physical pain caused from an external origin due to what Chinese medicine calls an attack of perverse energy (i.e., wind, cold and dampness). This type of invasion into the body causes a stagnation, which results in a burning type of pain. An accompanying deficiency in blood and energy will result in pain and numbness.
Certain times of the year many patients come in with the same problem, such as frozen shoulders, low back pain, headache, pain that travels throughout their body. Patients will say they get up in the morning and just can’t stand straight or cannot move their arm. This is called seasonal pain. In our bodies we have 12 principle channels that circulate blood and energy. Each principle channel is related to a month of the year. The energy of the body follows temporal changes in the environment and not conforming to climatic variations causes stagnation with pain located in muscles, tendons, ligaments and nerves.
This maladaptation of external perverse climatic energy changes can also be due to internal deficiencies in the body. Causes of internal deficiencies are many and varied: long-term stress, drugs – both legal and illegal, alcohol abuse, and also physical and emotional trauma. This type of pain moves to various parts of the body and can present as headaches, burning pain, deep aches and many of the symptoms associated with fibromyalgia, chronic pain and many other health issues.
3. Traumatic Pain – Traumatic pain is caused by an injury to the body from external causes (i.e., a fall, an auto accident, etc.). Acupuncture treatments for traumatic pain will vary depending on the location of the injury and the type of damage done.
