What Does Acupuncture Do? Or, What’s the Point?
I have answered this many different ways over the years. It changes depending on who I am talking to, how I personally have been thinking about it, and the context of the discussion. My perspective on the question, “What does acupuncture do?”, after years of pretty dramatic transformations, has by now settled somewhat, so I will take another stab at an answer.
There have been many studies on the mechanisms of acupuncture. Some are better than others, though many are quite good. A scan of these studies shows that there are very many effects of acupuncture on the central and peripheral nervous, circulatory and immune systems, as well as on local skin, muscle and bone tissue. And then add to that our other tools: moxibustion, non-insertion needles, manual massage, nutrition, herbal medicine, breath work, and counselling.
To get to the heart of the real question, “What does an acupuncture session do?” (which always involves more than needles), there are simply too many variables for these studies to understand all at once. So I am going to take a different route to understand the effects of an acupuncture treatment in three aspects.
1. Sympathetic-Parasympathetic Balance
The body and mind have two modes of operating: sympathetic and parasympathetic. You may have heard of sympathetic as “fight-flight-freeze”. This is the stressed-out state, the “your life is on the line” feeling. Adrenaline and cortisol pump into your blood stream. All the activity (blood flow, nerves firing) go to the outside, mainly into the muscles so that you can act to save your life. You are also hyper-focused on what’s immediately in front of you.
Parasympathetic is “rest and digest”. Any time your life is not on the line, you should be here, relaxing. In this state, you sleep, digest your food, talk and share, feel compassion and generosity. In this state, you heal your injuries, remove inflammation, clean the internal landscape of your body, and allow your mind to become clear and settled.
We often talk about these as two states of the nervous system, but they are not. They are whole body-mind experiences.
In classical terms, this is yin-yang balance. Sympathetic is yang; parasympathetic is yin. Both are needed, both are vital to being alive. But that have to be in balance—the right amounts at the right moments. Deviation from a regular, smooth swinging between the two sides leads to disease.
Sympathetic is designed for short, sudden bursts and then to quickly fade. Parasympathetic is the foundation, the stable ground that your body and mind rest on most of the time. In modern life, many of us do the opposite. We live in the sympathetic. Coffee shoots us into sympathetic. Sugar causes cortisol to spike. News, social media, TV and movies are often sympathetic stimulants.
It is no wonder anxiety, insomnia, digestive disorders, and the wide range of inflammatory diseases are rampant in modern life.
Acupuncture regulates the sympathetic-parasympathetic balance. By and large, an acupuncture treatments flips the switch into the “rest and digest” parasympathetic state. Acupuncture at most areas of the body cause a parasympathetic response, which is good because most of us need a lot more parasympathetic in our lives. Treating some areas will create a “fight-fight” sympathetic response, such as Hegu LI-4, which if you know the theory makes perfect sense.
A well-trained acupuncturist will be able to see where you are at and where you should be, and make the adjustment with a few quick interventions. The aim is to even out the extremes, create tone where tissue is too lax, stimulate what is dormant, relax what is over-excited, focus what is scattered, cool what is hot, warm what is cold… you get the idea. The Middle Path. The Goldie Locks Zone. That’s where life thrives.
2. Interconnection
The second major aspect of an acupuncture treatment is that it connects you to yourself. Acupuncture promotes embodiment, making you aware of parts of your body that you may not have felt in years.
Illness often settles in places where there is a little or no blood flow, nervous system activity and conscious awareness. An acupuncturist is trained to find these areas and treat them to reintegrate them into the rest of the system. Health relies on all of the systems and tissues of the body communicating well with each other. That is one reason we might treat the foot for back pain, the forearm for a headache, or the shin for constipation.
So there is interconnection between the mind and the body, and between the different areas of the body. When there is free movement of blood, fluids and information around the body, from the organs to the skin (and from the skin to the organs), from the feet to the hands to the head and back down again, only then the body-mind is able to heal itself. Healing is dependent on integration and communication. And then, with the whole body’s resources online, we may direct its attention specifically to the area we found that needs the healing.
3. Resonance with Nature
The ultimate goal of acupuncture is to get your body and mind to resonate with nature. Nature is the source of all life, including human life. Everything that is born and grows does so because of specific conditions in nature. Nature has a rhythm—things happen in a certain way at a certain time—and all living things align with that rhythm as they participate in interweaving cycles of life.
Human beings, uniquely among the living things, can choose to unalign themselves. And if we do, disease results. Recovery and healing comes from realigning with nature. Even a small degree of realignment—a little more rest, a better diet—can make the difference between, for example, getting over a cold or dealing with a lingering cough for months. All illness is like this, to varying degrees.
(Inherited aspects of disease is a bit different—that for another time. And many illnesses do not come from a personal choice to separate from nature, but rather a choice that was made for you by someone else—the people that built a factory next to your house, the people that built a society on fossil fuel energy, the people that chose deforestation, the people that chose large-scale chemical agriculture—all of these choices severed nature from other people and created many illnesses for generations.)
Resonating with nature is like catching a wave. You cannot paddle a surfboard out into the ocean, stand up and surf. You have to wait for the ocean to move you. And even then you cannot just sit there. You have to paddle towards the shore as the wave comes. You have to pick up speed and stand up at just the right moment. You have to angle the tip of the surfboard and adjust your balance to stay in front of the crest. All of this has to happen so that you can ride a wave that you do not control.
Resonating with nature is like this, and it is the source of life and human health. Each acupuncture treatment brings you a little more in line with the rhythms of nature. It makes it easier to go to sleep at a reasonable time, to let go of cravings and eat natural foods, to have the energy, freedom and motivation to exercise, to feel at ease enough to be outside, to laugh, to enjoy this gift of life. For some, it happens fast. For some, it takes time to slowly return to nature. It depends on how long you have been away, and what you are doing in between acupuncture sessions. Acupuncture is just one tool, though a very good one, to reconnect people to the source of life.
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Henry practices acupuncture and natural medicine in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. He also teaches Tai Chi and Qigong, and teaches acupuncture courses at undergraduate and professional levels.
Cover photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash
