Acupuncture
What does Acupuncture and Chinese Herbal Medicine (CHM) treat?
Chinese medicine has successfully treated many common health conditions for more than 2,500 years. It has passed through the ages in an unbroken lineage – used to promote longevity and life balance in the people that seek its treatments. The medicine isn’t directed toward a particular disease or condition, but it works instead by activating the body’s self-healing ability. For this reason, acupuncture and Chinese Medicine can help address everything from irritable bowel syndrome and back pain, to Parkinson’s disease and the side effects of chemotherapy.
Unlike many healthcare options in the United States, acupuncture and Chinese Medicine focus on treating the root cause of the patient’s health problems. After all, symptoms are merely manifestations of an underlying malfunction and disease process. By addressing the main source for a person’s symptoms, this medicine truly helps patients to overcome many ailments and sets them on a course for optimal health.
At The Root Acupuncture Clinic, we use a combination of both Eastern Medicine (Chinese Medicine/Acupuncture) and Functional Medicine to approach personalized patient health care from all available modalities – creating profound balance, harmony, and well-being in our patients. We recognize that the human body functions structurally, chemically, and bioenergetically. We specialize in musculoskeletal pain, gastrointestinal health, stress, and sleep, but are able to treat a wide variety of ailments.
“I am not a fan of needles. Does acupuncture hurt?”
This is the most common concern expressed by new patients and the fastest to be quickly alleviated. Great care is taken to ensure that patients experience little discomfort and about 90% of patients find that they will drift off or take a small nap during the treatment – you will feel that comfortable with acupuncture! We would commonly tell patients that some of our acupuncture needles are so thin that we could probably fit 30 of them in the head of a hypodermic needle. Well, we finally put that to the test as you can see for yourself – we ended up fitting 35 of them!
When performing acupuncture on our patients, each needle is inserted with a swift tap. This helps the needle quickly bypass the epidermal layer of skin where your pain receptors are located. This causes most patients to only feel only a small pinch (that dissipates almost as quickly as it appears), many others describe no sensation at all (other than feeling a tap on their skin). Other times when we are working on larger muscles/tendons, acupuncture can sometimes cause a small twitch from the muscle or a small ache to arrive in the area. Both of those sensations quickly dissipate and, as described before, patients drift into a calming parasympathetic “rest and digest” nervous system response that results in a nice relaxing nap.
We were able to fit 35 acupuncture needles into the head of a single hypodermic needle.