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| Why try acupuncture for emotional problems?
You can use it to help limit the number of pharmaceutical medications you are taking
It's ideal for people with mild, intermittent, or temporary symptoms
No lasting or dangerous side effects
Acupuncture is a safe alternative for people who aren't compliant with their psychiatric medications
Acupuncture can be used safely in cooperation with standard treatments
You can get positive results fairly quickly, without having to undergo analysis or long term counseling
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Chinese Medicine has a long history of treating mental and emotional problems. Ancient texts describe the use of the so-called ghost points for what Europeans would have labeled possession by demons, or what is now recognized as dementia, psychosis, or schizophrenia. To treat you needle a series of 13 points sequentially. The window of the sky points, located on the neck and base of the skull treat symptoms like confusion, mania, or seizures. These treatments are particularly effective when blood flow to the brain is obstructed, by arteriosclerosis, for example.
Emotional balancing can be an unexpected benefit of standard acupuncture. People who seek treatment for a simple orthopedic problem often report that they are not yelling at the kids anymore, their insomnia is gone, or their mood has lifted.
Auricular acupuncture is employed for addiction, recovery, and stress symptoms, and can be used for narcotics, smoking, and weight loss. The North American Detox Association protocol helps reduce anxiety, and curb appetite and cravings. Ear points are also commonly used to enhance effectiveness of standard acupuncture treatments. These protocols are probably less than 50% effective over the long run for addiction, but are very useful as an adjunct therapy.
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| Acupuncture works for depression, emotional swings due to hormonal imbalances, attention deficit disorder, panic attacks, confusion, poor memory, and more |
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| Feeling overwhelmed, stressed, irritable, and unable to sleep? And how would you like to treat these problems naturally and safely? |
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| Acupuncture and Chinese herbs can be safely used for all ages. Situational depression in the elderly, like after an illness or death can be helped with regular treatments. |
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How does acupuncture work for emotional problems?
According to the National Institutes of Health, acupuncture effects brain chemistry directly: altering the release of neurotransmitters, pain killing endorphins, and hormones. The stimulation increases immune system response, while normalizing blood pressure, heart rate, blood flow, and body temperature. Acupuncture also affects serotonin levels, treating sleep problems, depression, and appetite.
Acupuncture restores harmony and balance back to the Heart and Mind. Americans tend to disregard any mental influences on the physical body. Many doctors also view patients in this manner, treating each symptom separately; not recognizing that guilt about a marital affair is causing the upset stomach. Acupuncture is uniquely effective for reintegration of body/mind/spirit and healing emotional imbalances as well as the physical body. New research shows that neurotransmitters and neuropeptides have receptors in the GI tract, white cells, kidney, and pancreas. If your emotions are repressed, indulged, or even misdirected, you may eventually manifest with physical symptoms. Different people will react differently to the same environmental and emotional stressors, according to their genetics, personality type, and lifestyle habits. So some will end up with headaches, others with back pain, still others with skin conditions.
Western medicine is finally recognizing this tendency of different personality types to tend toward certain diseases. A 12-year study of middle-aged men and women showed that suppressed anger significantly interacted with elevated blood pressure to produce the highest mortality. People with high blood pressure who suppressed their anger were five times as likely to die as hypertensive people who expressed it.
Conversely, if your internal organs are imbalanced from a chronic physical ailment, the mind may be affected as well. One simple example is a person with chronic disease developing depression. Our goal is to restore balance to the physical body and the mind.
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What is the treatment process?
Each and every patient is treated according to their individual pattern of symptoms. Your anxiety may be treated totally differently than mine, depending on the root cause and accompanying physical complaints.
For chronic emotional disorders you may need to be seen once or twice a week for a few weeks. To treat addiction, you will need auricular acupuncture daily in the beginning in the low cost clinic. We may need to treat your physical ailments at the same session to get optimal results. That old chicken and egg conundrum: did the pain lead to the emotional imbalance or vice versa?
For anxiety, bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, depression, stroke recovery, and neurological disorders like Parkinsons, scalp acupuncture is very effective, especially if started when symptoms first appear. The Chinese perform strong scalp needle stimulation, which can cause pain and bleeding. Here we apply electrical stimulation instead to regulate serotonin and norepinephrine levels. I treated one gentleman with major depression once a week for one month with this protocol, with amazing results. This type of treatment is effective for 55-95% of the patients in the studies. In China they treat daily for up to 6 weeks. I find it more realistic, and more financially feasible, to do once or twice a week sessions, with a gradual reduction in your medications.
Please feel free to call me with questions about your specific symptoms and treatment plans.
Susan Mosley, LAc. Dipl.C.H.
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