People often ask if acupuncture can treat, any number of things. The answer invariably is “yes”, but there’s more to the answer. First, you can take a look at the list of conditions that the World Health Organization approves for acupuncture here. While it can help a great many things, some conditions are easier to treat than others. Even a diagnosis of “low back pain” can have widely different treatment outcomes between two different people with differing severity.
Diagnosis in Traditional Chinese Medicine
Second, although an accurate diagnosis from your medical doctor is helpful for acupuncture, it is not necessary. That’s because Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is a complete system, with its own tools for diagnosis and treatment. There’s more than one model for TCM diagnosis out there, but I’ll explain one of the more simple ones, and how it relates to your acupuncture treatments.
TCM of Diagnosis and Pattern Identification
Your first visit to a new acupuncturist will involve a bit more time dedicated to asking about your symptoms and their history. They will also want to take a close look at your tongue and check your pulse on both wrists. The acupuncturist wants to put all this information together to find the underlying pattern of disease. They can use this information to come up with a TCM diagnosis. One mode of diagnosis is using the “8 Principals.”
8 Principals of TCM
Practitioners first want to understand the pattern of disharmony, and one way to do that is by classifying according to the 8 principles. They consist of 4 pairs: Exterior/Interior, Hot/Cold, Excess/Deficiency, and yin/yang. Remember in acupuncture we want to balance the flow of qi. So these principals look at the disruption of qi. The first tells the location, then the temperature, and then the quantity. The final category of yin/yang is an overall summary of the previous ones. (Remember, yin is interior, cold, and deficiency. Yang is the opposite.)
Using Acupuncture to Balance According to the 8 Principals
Armed with this diagnosis, the acupuncturist can now come up with a treatment plan, of where to place the needles. Sometimes it’s just one thing out of balance, other times it’s a combination. For example, an exterior + heat + excess is a yang disease. It can have symptoms of alternating fever and chills, sore throat, sinus congestion, sneezing, thick yellow phlegm, and rapid pulse. It could be something like strep throat. We then pick acupuncture points to promote the restoration of this pattern of disruption.
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