What I love about acupuncture as a holistic practice is the role that the patient plays in the process. Time and again I see clients who come in with symptoms, having no idea where they are coming from or what is causing them. Then slowly, as we start working together and I ask them questions about their diet, sleep, emotions, or other habits they might not have considered, a pattern emerges.
Sometimes I can see it right away—like when my client with post-nasal drip and sinus headaches told me she starts her day with a cup of iced coffee, or when a new client with loose stools told me that she eats really well and keeps hydrated with coconut water every day. I knew right away because, from a Chinese Medicine perspective, those are considered cold, and they cause dampness in the digestive system, which can lead to post-nasal drip and loose stools.
For others, it takes longer. Here I will share two cases where, after months of working together, we found some answers together:
The first client is in her late forties and has severe TMJ, to the point of not being able to speak or eat. She gets radiating, shooting pain, seemingly out of the blue, that makes her muscles contract. When I first met her, she was on a high dose of Gabapentin—an amount so high that I didn’t even know it was possible. As we started to work together, I noticed the muscle tension in her back, shoulders, and calves. I have been working on moving the energy of the channels in the big meridians of the Stomach and Gallbladder for her, since those are the ones that mostly go to the jaw. Every session was different: sometimes she felt better, sometimes there was no effect. But as a whole, she was starting to feel more energized, and her nervous system was becoming more balanced. She was on medical leave from her job and started working again, but we noticed quickly that the tension her job created was impeding her healing process. She decided to quit her job and spend more time doing things she enjoyed, like running and spending time with family.
On the whole, she was feeling better and started tapering down her dose of Gabapentin, but we still didn’t know exactly what was causing the TMJ symptoms. Then, during a holiday break, she ate a lot of candy and the pain returned intensely. It came as a shock to her; she could hardly believe it herself when she told me the story. Is it possible that eating sugar could have a direct connection to the pain? That’s when we realized the flare-up nature of her issue. The sugar was not the main culprit, but definitely a catalyst that brought her symptoms out.
Looking at it from a Western medical perspective, the only way I can explain this is inflammation—something creates an irritation in the nervous system, or in her case, the trigeminal facial nerve to be precise. Stressful work and eating too much sugar were the main triggers for her. Her diet was otherwise very good, and she had good emotional balance. We also started introducing hormone therapy for her. Even though her symptoms started long before her perimenopause stage, losing estrogen at this point in her life would only make her symptoms more intense. So we have been able to keep her away from flare-ups and reduce her medication dose little by little. Every time she steps down her dose, she experiences temporary symptoms, but she is able to manage them as her nerves slowly heal.
I think the most important learning for her is feeling in control and having an idea of what she can do to help herself, instead of simply upping her dose of medication. Now, instead of powering through a stressful meeting and having a backlash of painful episodes for a day, she is learning to live a more balanced life: keeping her cortisol and adrenals in check and reducing inflammation in her body.
The second example is a combination of cases of women whom I see for fertility or due to painful periods, such as endometriosis or IBS during their cycles. Time and again, I find that when women learn how to listen to the rhythm of their cycle and modify their lives according to their hormonal shifts, everything else starts to fall into place.
Chinese Medicine is very precise about what needs to happen energetically in the body at different phases of the hormonal cycle. Leading up to menstruation, we want to move energy and blood, so we use moving and warming herbs. Once the blood flow starts, we want to rest and relax as much as we can: wear warm socks, avoid iced drinks or swimming in cold water, and eat nourishing foods—bone broths, eggs, and meat are best during this time. If we use herbs, we choose Yin- and Blood-nourishing herbs to replenish the body. During ovulation, I usually don't prescribe herbs and let the body take a break. Most people have more energy and fewer symptoms during this time, unless they have ovarian cysts, in which case I prescribe moving herbs for those few days.
When breast tenderness starts, it is a good indication of how stagnated the energy is—whether it occurs one week or two days before the period shows the difference. This is a good time to start moving energy, which also helps with the emotional symptoms of PMS. When we move blood for women in Chinese Medicine, we are really talking about balancing hormones. The blood-moving herbs also address emotions, which operate on the Qi, or energetic, level. That's because blood has to pass through the Heart. We have an ancient saying in Chinese Medicine that "the Heart is the mother of Blood." What it means is that the Heart is responsible for moving blood throughout the whole body, but also that when something affects the blood, we feel it in our Heart. Thus, shifts in hormones also affect our emotions.
So once the women in my practice learn how to listen to their hormonal rhythms and dance with them, everything starts to become easier. They sleep better, have better digestion, and have a much easier time with their periods. And if one cycle is more difficult, they can pinpoint it and say, "I had a stressful time at work," "I ate cold food," or "I was traveling and didn't get to rest"—in the best-case scenario, have a baby when other doctors told them they never would!
The one hour a week of acupuncture, is not just effective in that moment, the main effect of it is when the person learns a new way of relating to themselves. Like a new bridge that connects the conscious mind to the unconscious body realm. When we see results we start to listen and trust our intuition on a different level. What each person learns from that direct connection is not comparable with any healing modality. As Dag Hammarskjöld put it, when we focus on the inner silence, the world outside starts to make sense. The way I look at it, when we get space—when someone truly hears us, or when we give ourselves the time to sit with our inner silence—we are giving our nervous system a moment of deep healing. In the Polarity tradition, we call it "being in the zone." In Zen meditation, we call it No Mind. When our busy mind stops being the focus, the deep well of healing energy gets a chance to flow and fully immerse us in its power. We connect to ourselves, to our Heart, to Nature, and to the source of life.