Regulating the Body with Acupuncture

In my daily acupuncture practice, my patients often ask, “How does acupuncture work?” It’s challenging to speak about Chinese Medicine without using the word “energy.” When I do mention energy within the human body, I expect to see eyes glaze over. We can relate to solar energy, wind energy, electromagnetic energy, or the energy it takes to climb the stairs, but energy in the body can be hard to describe.

Chinese Medicine developed over three thousand years ago, long before microscopes, x-rays, and CT scans. Through careful study, energy was discovered to move in specific pathways affecting all the body’s systems. Energy, called “qi” (chee) in Chinese and sometimes translated as “life force,” is what allows blood and body fluid to move as it should, and muscles, joints, and internal organs to function properly.

A way to think of the body’s energy is like a hose carrying water to your garden. If there’s a lack of power to move the water or a kink in the hose, your garden will not get what it needs or prosper. In this analogy, the Chinese medical perspective pays attention to the “life force” activating the water, as well as it’s smooth movement through the hose.

Translating this to the body, if energy is deficient your blood won’t move to your extremities well and you may easily get cold hands and feet. Or, if energy is stagnant in the large intestine, the stool won’t move properly and one will feel constipated.

The modern day practitioner of Chinese Medicine, who may use acupuncture or herbal medicine, looks for where there is deficiency or blockage of the energy of the body. This is apparent through the patient’s symptoms, the way the pulse feels, the color of the face and the tongue, and from the skin’s temperature, to name a few of the signs we’re looking at to diagnose and treat.

Stimulating specific points along the defined pathways will affect how the energy moves. This can be with manual pressure, an acupuncture needle, heat, or mild electrical stimulation. It’s like correcting the kink in the hose, allowing the water to move as it should to the garden.

Certain foods also affect the energy of the body and the associated organ systems. The qi of the stomach should be moving downward through the body, and if it rebels upward, one would experience nausea, vomiting, hiccups, reflux, cough. Eating ginger redirects the energy of the stomach downward, so it can be relieving to these symptoms.

If one is feeling nauseous, aside from eating ginger, a point on the wrist could be massaged with the thumb. When you’re looking at your palm, this is located at the mid point across the wrist around two inches up from the wrist crease. It can surprisingly reduce nausea as you’re rubbing it.

In terms of modern scientific research for acupuncture’s effectiveness, this is one of the most validated points to alleviate nausea. There has been extensive scientific research over the past 20 years investigating both acupuncture’s effect on the body and effectiveness at treating health issues.  We’ve learned of some interesting actions that happen with stimulating acupuncture points, for example, like the release of endorphins, reduction of inflammation, and increase of blood flow. Yet, there is much more to learn.

When I was studying pre-medicine in college, I wondered how we understood and treated the body throughout the world thousands of years ago before our modern technology discovered cells and how they act. What drew me to Chinese Medicine was this understanding of energy. This remains important not to overlook along with our modern knowledge of the body. Our medical culture can benefit from employing all views of medicine, integrating different perspectives to support our health.

Originally published in The Bridge.