Acupuncture for Chronic Conditions
Helping to improve your quality of life
There are a multitude of chronic conditions that can significantly impact your quality of life. Whether the condition is physical, emotional or mental you may experience a wide range of symptoms such as pain, low energy, disturbed sleep, cognitive difficulties, low mood or just generally feeling unwell.
Acupuncture is a very versatile and safe mode of treatment. It can help reduce pain, improve function, sleep and energy and help you to feel more like you again, whatever the underlying cause.
People have acupuncture for a wide range of chronic conditions to help improve wellbeing and to reduce pain
Acupuncture is very versatile and can be use for both acute and chronic conditions. However, many people use acupuncture for symptomatic relief from chronic pain or illness because there are limited conventional medical options, or the options that are available haven't helped or have unwanted side effects.
Acupuncture uses the Chinese medicine framework to diagnose, understand and treat symptoms and conditions. Acupuncture seeks to address the root cause as well as the presenting symptoms and uses the body's innate ability to heal and self-regulate. It doesn't look at the mind and body in isolation of each other but rather looks at how matters of the mind can influence the body and vice versa. Therefore, it can be useful for helping mental health issues as well as physical pain or chronic illness. Western medicine diagnoses can be a helpful to guide treatment but they are not essential because Chinese medicine considers the individual and their presenting symptoms rather than the disease name. Chinese medicine is also concerned with why someone has the symptoms they have and the factors in their life that may have contributed to their condition. It is the original lifestyle medicine.
Jill Storstein is passionate about harnessing the body and mind's natural ability to heal and understanding the mechanisms to make this possible. She uses acupuncture and lifestyle advice derived from Chinese medicine and modern medical scientific research to help guide people back to a better quality of life.
Evidence Based Acupuncture
Acupuncture can be very effective at treating pain and headaches. It has also been shown to help to reduce stress, balance hormones and mood as well as improve sleep and energy. The research base into acupuncture is growing all the time. In 2017, researchers John McDonald PhD, MSc, FAACMA and Stephen Janz RN, BN, BAc, GCCHM, MPH, MAACMA reviewed all the evidence to date. In their summary, they said:
"Our study found evidence for the effectiveness of acupuncture for 117 conditions, with stronger evidence for acupuncture’s effectiveness for some conditions than others. Acupuncture is considered safe in the hands of a well-trained practitioner and has been found to be cost-effective for some conditions. The quality and quantity of research into acupuncture’s effectiveness is increasing.” Acupuncture Evidence Project, p55
You can see a full list of the conditions they found evidence for acupuncture's effectiveness on page 2 of the summary and a link to the PDF is below:
You can find out more on the Evidenced Based Acupuncture website along with evidence summaries of other conditions acupuncture can help with.