I am thrilled to present this week’s Wine & Wellness Wednesday on acupuncture! I started going for acupuncture about two years ago and it has become an important tool in my personal wellness toolbox.
This topic comes to us from Stephanie Braunwarth, L.Ac.,FABORM, RYT-200, with Des Moines Acupuncture Clinic. (http://desmoinesacupunctureworks.com)
For thousands of years, individuals have been using Chinese medicine and acupuncture as a way to heal the root cause of their health conditions. Whether your health concern is physical (stress, digestion, infertility, hormone imbalance, poor sleep, musculoskeletal pain) or emotional (anxiety, sadness, irritability, etc.) acupuncture can treat the underlying cause of these life-altering health challenges so you can live a life on your terms and with purpose! Your body tries to heal itself every day. It’s called homeostasis. Acupuncture stimulates the process of healing in a directed way, through the insertion of needles into the skin, increasing circulation to any area of the body that needs healing.
There are a number of amazing benefits to regular acupuncture care. The following explains just three of the reasons why you should add it to your healthcare regime:
1) It treats the root cause of your symptoms
We take an over-the-counter pain reliever or NSAID for our muscle tension and headaches, an anti-histamine for our allergies, birth-control pills for our menstrual cramps, and an anti-diarrheal for our IBS. These medications, though, are masking your symptoms and not treating the root cause of why you have the symptom in the first place. They may be a temporary relief, which at times is necessary, but when a condition becomes chronic, the issue lies in the person’s body constitution. That’s where acupuncture and Chinese medicine come in. Acupuncture treats each individual uniquely, based on what their body needs and what traditional diagnostics are showing. By treating the root cause of a health condition, the individual’s health stabilizes and their body becomes more in balance.
2) It reduces the body’s stress response
Your stressors aren’t going to disappear with acupuncture, unfortunately, but your body’s response to potential stress will be reduced. Acupuncture helps to relax the sympathetic nervous system, which kicks in to high gear when we are in fight or flight mode. We need our fight or flight response when we are in danger, but do we need it sitting in traffic or at our job each day? Daily activities will be more enjoyable when we are in a more relaxed, coherent state.
3) Better sleep
When our sympathetic nervous systems don’t feel the need to release cortisol all night long, the body can more easily go in to rest and digest mode and sleep soundly through the night. Our bodies heal and repair when we sleep. If we don’t sleep, we don’t heal, period.