Acupuncture

A Quick Look at Acupuncture

Would you obey me if I told you to lie down on a bed and have somebody poke several needles into your body? Insane, right? Nobody in their right mind would want a needle poking into them, more so with hundreds of needles, right? Not quite. For thousands of years now, people have been resorting to acupuncture to cure their ailments and pains.

What is acupuncture?

Acupuncture is an alternative treatment that originated from China. It involves inserting fine filiform needles into various points in the body with the purpose of relieving pain or curing an illness. Unlike the hollow needles that doctors use to administer drugs or to draw blood, filiform needles have a smooth tip and are not painful when they’re inserted into the body. Patients usually report only a minimal amount of pain, if any at all.

In acupuncture, it is believed that the body’s qi flows along a meridian and that acupuncture points lie within its path. During times of illness, the qi’s path is disturbed, and it is through needles that the flow of qi is restored or fixed.

Acupuncture and Pain Relief

In acupuncture, the therapist usually has a chart for the different parts of the body. There are points in the body’s surface that correspond to a certain internal organ. For example, the webbed part of between your thumb and forefinger corresponds to the head and therefore relieves headaches when pressed. This allows the acupuncturist to treat several diseases without having to directly handle the organ involved.

By manipulating the body’s qi, acupuncture can relieve acute and chronic pain. It can relieve abdominal distention, sinusitis, constipation, dysmenorrhea, and all the pain that comes with these conditions. It is also widely used for curing atypical chest pain. It helps remove headaches and dizziness. One of the most popular uses for acupuncture is to fight arthritis and rheumatism because it can help stop muscle spasms and tremors.

Athletes also use acupuncture to relieve joint pain, sprains, and contusions. It also helps with the dreaded tennis elbow and the frozen shoulder and even helps relieve pain that comes from fractures. Amputees are also using acupuncture to deal with their phantom pain.

A lot of people are skeptical over acupuncture because research in this area is generally very vague and poorly done. After all, it is quite hard to study something if the presence of the body’s meridians or the path of its qi has not even been explained yet.  Still, though, it’s quite obvious that there are several cases wherein acupuncture works. It works on animals as well as humans, so you can’t say that it’s all in the mind.