We have adopted a simple way to explain how acupuncture works that not only satisfies our patients but the vast majority of the public. Be this, "Balance Method" Acupuncture, "TCM" Acupuncture, "Master Tung"Acupuncture or "Five Element" Acupuncture etc. Once people get the big picture of how acupuncture works it’s like a light bulb going on. Before we get to this however, lets us consider the following points

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1. The single greatest obstacle acupuncture has faced in the West is that it’s very premise – that you can help dozens of medical conditions by carefully inserting hair-like, solid, flexible needles in people, fiddle with the needles a little, leave them in for a while, and then take them out – has no precedent in modern medical knowledge and it defies mainstream Western logic.

2. We acupuncturists often tell our patients that acupuncture works by helping the body to heal itself. It just rolls off our tongue. But few appreciate just how remarkable this simple fact is.

3. Western medicine’s strength is its ability to intervene with man-made resources that take over the body and repair problems (or blunt their symptoms) from the outside-in like a mechanic repairing a machine.

4. Because we equate medical care with mechanic-like interventions, to some, acupuncture seems to make no sense. Western culture has little to no familiarity with such a concept that you could have a medical system whose sole goal is to stimulate the body’s own intrinsic resource – healing from the inside out.

 

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Explaining Acupuncture:

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We seldom get 100% of our potential self-healing abilities, automatically. Acupuncture helps us squeeze more out of these abilities. If somebody has a problem and it’s not automatically addressed by the body’s resources we believe it to be beyond the body’s resources.

Now hold on, just wait a moment there….This is NOT necessarily so!

We just do not get 100% out of our self-healing abilities automatically, all of the time, any more than we get 100% out of our brain resources or our muscle resources.

This is where we come in. This is where acupuncture excels, this is what acupuncturists are specialists at, that’s what we do. A series of acupuncture treatments, done by a well-trained acupuncturist should consistently boost the self-healing/managing efforts by at least 10-20%. This may sound conservative to some people. I am not saying it will help the problem by 10-20%, I am saying it will boost the bodies fight against the problem by 10-20%. Often, that little difference makes all the difference in the world.

The very best candidates for acupuncture are those in whom a 10-20% boost will allow the body to gain the upper hand on their problem. Now here, I am being conservative. We may well boost in excess of this percentage.

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An increasing weight of evidence from Western scientific research is demonstrating the effectiveness of acupuncture for treating a wide variety of conditions. From a biomedical viewpoint, acupuncture is believed to stimulate the nervous system, influencing the production of the body's communication substances - hormones and neurotransmitters. The resulting biochemical changes activate the body's self-regulating homeostatic systems, stimulating its natural healing abilities and promoting physical and emotional well-being.

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Evidence Based Acupuncture is a community run project created to show the current state of knowledge about acupuncture using the language of science. This project provides simple, trustworthy and robust evidence-based tools that will empower acupuncturists and acupuncture as equal among medicines, improving public health and saving lives.