What!!? You mean acupuncture does not always work? Well there is nothing in medicine that works for 100% of people 100% of the time.
So let’s talk about what would prevent you from achieving your health goals with acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine:
- The frequency of treatment is important. This medicine utilizes your body’s ability to heal itself. This ability varies from person to person based on health history and their life style. Our patients learn that the factors that caused their health problems are cumulative, and the health improvements with acupuncture are also cumulative. You cannot have visits too close together, but you can have them too far apart. We want to continually build on your improvement which is the key to staying healthy long term.
- The X Factor. There is something about your mind, body or lifestyle that we, or you, are unaware of. It could be that you had surgery 30 years ago and neglected to include that information on your intake form. Yet that still effects your health today. We just had a patient who was in his mid-60’s, he had shoulder pain. He was not getting better as quickly as we had expected. This patient forgot to tell us that he had open heart surgery at age 34. He did not realize that surgery to the chest effects some of the same muscles that work the shoulder. When we shifted our treatment, suddenly he got better. In that case we were able to overcome the X factor.
- Structural Problems. Acupuncture cannot change structural defects. For example, if you have a bone spur, we can provide pain management, but we cannot remove the bone spur, meaning the pain will most likely reoccur until the structural problem is taken care of. If you have a tumor that is pressing on an organ causing pain, we cannot change that situation. If you have a twist in your colon, we cannot undo that. Often in these situations, we can help the patient manage the situation, but we cannot remove structural defects.
Acupuncture is not magic, but when patients follow our treatment recommendations, about 90% of the time they reach their treatment goals.
