does acupuncture work on stress?
Saturday, July 4th, 2009 at
3:21 pm
my mum’s thinking about it but does it work?
Tagged with: Acupuncture • stress • work
Filed under: Acupuncture Stress
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Well I have tried it and it worked for me. Just make sure you go to a place that knows what they’re doing and is sanitary.
Yes it may, but not because of any unique intrinsic or magically properties of acupuncture. “Stress” is a very subjective thing…like pain or nausea, and subjective things tend to respond well to the proscribed rituals that go along with many AM treatments.
Making a decision to book an appointment may relieve some stress just on its own. Then the anticipation and expectation because of reports of benefits they’ve heard from friends or read about on pro-acupuncture sites on the web. Most acupuncture clinics I’ve seen are very funky places with soothing music and lighting, soft restful colours on the walls. The rituals of the explanation of what is going to happen and what the client should expect to feel, the cleaning of the skin, the insertion of the needles…..all of these little rituals may help reduce your moms stress.
Acupuncture has never made any difference in the progress of any real illness, but for subjective things that are subject to the placebo response, it certainly may “work”, if you have a vague and fuzzy definition of what you mean by work. On the other hand, your mom could probably get the same results by going for a long walk by the lake, playing a game, going on a mini-vacation, or indulging in other favourite activities….probably for less cost.
It works as well as meditation, yoga, working out, or anything else that you can do for free. She shouldn’t waste her hard-earned money on it.
It’s best to take control of your own stress levels rather than relying on someone else to poke it out of you. Progressive relaxation is a method works very well for me. Here’s a link to it:
http://www.hws.edu/studentlife/counseling_relax.aspx
I prefer the Combination Relaxation Exercise in the 4th paragraph down.
The mainstreamers would have you believe that accupuncture doesn’t work for stress or anything else other than by placebo effect, but they say that about anything that is not controlled by mainstream medicine. The fact is that it can be very effective for stress and a great many other condtions. In fact, the evidence is pretty convincing that it does work, and not merely by placebo effect.
For example, in 2003, the World Health Organization’s Department of Essential Drugs and Medicine Policy published a report on acupuncture that listed a series of diseases, symptoms or conditions for which acupuncture has been demonstrated as an effective treatment: Acute bacillary dysentery, Adverse reactions to radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy, Allergic rhinitis, Biliary colic, Depression, Essential hypertension, Headache, Induction of childbirth and correction of the malposition of fetus, Inflammation of the tissues surrounding the shoulder, Leukopenia, Nausea and vomiting including morning sickness, Pain in the epigastrium, face, neck, tennis elbow, lower back, knee, during dentistry and after operations, Primary dysmenorrhea, Primary hypotension, Renal colic, Rheumatoid arthritis, Sciatica, Sprains, and Strokes
A review for the American Pain Society/American College of Physicians found evidence that acupuncture is effective for chronic low back pain. In 1997, the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) issued a consensus statement on acupuncture that concluded that despite research on acupuncture being difficult to conduct, there is sufficient evidence to expand its use and encourage further studies of the phenomenon.
A Cochrane Review concluded that acupuncture was effective in reducing the risk of post-operative nausea and vomiting with minimal side effects, though it was less than or equal to the effectiveness of preventive antiemetic medications.
A 2006 review concluded that acupuncture was approximately equal to preventive antiemetic drugs in treating nausea.
Another Cochrane Review concluded that electroacupuncture can be helpful in the treatment of vomiting after the start of chemotherapy.
The Osteoarthritis Research Society International released a set of consensus recommendations in 2008 that concluded acupuncture may be useful for treating the symptoms of osteoarthritis of the knee.
The Internal Revenue Service, who is not exactly known to be generous with allowing frivolous deductions unless you are one of the wealthy elite, has allowed acupuncture to be deducted as a medical expense since 1973.
That is a pretty impressive body of evidence for a mere placebo, huh?
And that is but a small list of the evidence.
What bugs me is that the mainstreamers are all too quick to put alternatives to mainstream medicine down for lack of scientific evidence, but when such evidence is presented they try to have it both ways and reject the evidence. Only THEY know what works regardless of the scientific evidence or all the testimonials to the contrary.
The truth is that not only is their credible evidence of accupuncture working, it has a history of thousands of years use and millions of people who have benefitted. So who are you gonna believe?
Thousands of people with no agenda to follow and no product to report or industry to protect have testified about the effectiveness of accupuncture treatments. Do you think those who deny it and warn against it are equally altruistic?
Absolutely, our clients are always raving about the results they have received from acupuncture. Find out more about it here: http://www.actnowcenter.com