Is Acupuncture still Relevant today ?

IS ACUPUNCTURE STILL RELEVANT TODAY?

The human body is a truly amazing thing, nothing that man has ever created or made can match it. In ancient times it was called ‘the temple of the gods’, because supposedly, all the gods and spiritual beings worked together to design and make it. Its self-healing abilities are astonishing and many people live their whole lives in good health. However, for many of us, our health deteriorates because our self-healing abilities get reduced by life; through overwork, trauma, stress, emotions, aging, hereditary, poor diet, poisons and parasites and so on. Hence medicine has evolved over the millennia to help us back to health.

Modern medicine has been around for about 250 years and is amazing if you have an accident, a tumour, a broken bone or need surgery - no one hit by a car or with a broken leg asks for an acupuncturist! However, for most of our usual health problems, modern medicine has a problem with its methodology, simply because each of us human beings is totally individual, each of us has a set of totally unique proteins. Hence when a doctor prescribes us any medicine for an ailment, our body has a unique and individual response to the chemical prescribed and we can often react to it badly, this is known as a ‘side effect’. Doctors often have to try many different medicines to try to find something that helps your health problem, without actually giving you more (sometimes serious) health problems from the ‘side effects’.

Acupuncture has a different view about healing and attempts to promote health by diagnosing and removing the blockages that stop our own self-healing from doing its job properly. Hence a few acupuncture treatments can often make an amazing difference to a person’s health, as their self-healing abilities start functioning efficiently again.

Acupuncture has been around for a few thousand years, starting in China and developing and spreading across many countries and practiced in many different ways and styles. For example, Chinese styles tend to use thicker needles, deeper insertions and wriggle the needles. Japanese acupuncture, like the Kiiko Matsumoto style that I practise, uses very fine needles, shallow insertions and little manipulation. However, all styles of acupuncture seem to give excellent results, though some styles better than others - why is this?

Scientific research has failed to explain properly how acupuncture works, as its theories cannot explain why different styles are all generally effective. However, around the 30’s, Dr Manaka, a Japanese doctor and embryologist wrote about ‘system X’. He suggested that before the brain and spinal cord and nervous system fully develop in an embryo, a communication system exists (which he called ‘X’), just under the skin, which functions until the baby’s nervous system takes over. This system ‘X’ then becomes dormant, but can be activated by therapies such as acupuncture, shiatsu, massage etc. In 2018, the medical journal the Lancet excitedly reported that anatomists had, by studying living tissue rather than dead, discovered just such a system under the skin, which they named the ‘Interstitium’, thus perhaps confirming Dr Manaka’s theory.

A read of the patient feedback on my website can give you an insight into how acupuncture even today, has made a big difference to people's health and lives, or as a patient recently said, ‘If you are suffering from something nagging that doctors can’t get a grip on, or if you’re wandering around wondering why you just feel awful and anxious and you can’t shake it off, give this a go’

Lawrence - Stroud Acupuncture - https://stroudacupuncture.co.uk/