Jeff Rippey

Acupuncture is typically very good for managing this type of pain. Some topical creams/ointment/patches can help, over the counter pain meds can sometimes offer some relief (make sure you talk to your doctor or the pharmacist about any potential interactions with existing medication or conditions), and prescription medication can help to ease the pain associated with arthritis.

Even though it's painful, it's important to keep the joint moving and/or stay active.

Sometimes, yes, but I don't like to go this route. There can be quite a few potentially serious health complications from hyperthyroid. It's best to use prescription meds to bring the thyroid levels down and then come behind that with other therapies like acupuncture or herbal medicine to see if we can wean off the meds.

Whether or not your chronic ankle pain can be fixed is going to depend heavily on what's causing the pain. Chronic pain rarely "just happens". There's a history to what's going on. Without that history, it's very difficult to provide any useful answer.

My suggestion would be to start with either your primary care provider or an orthopedic specialist. Get some imaging and an evaluation of your ankle. If the images and eval give us a concrete cause for the pain, then we're in a much better position to set expectations around what can and cannot be done as well as what treatment modality is going to give you the best potential outcome.

There are at least 4 classes of drug with multiple individual meds in each class that could potentially reduce blood pressure. The trick is finding the one that works the best for you and your circumstances.

This is something that you need to work out with your primary care provider.

Sometimes things like sinus infection are self-limiting. In other words they often resolve on their own without any intervention. If the infection has been present for more than 10-14 days, a short course of antibiotics are the best option.

Addictive behaviors are often difficult to address via any means. The main problem is: there is no treatment that will force a person to quit if they aren't ready to quit.

Without knowing the specifics (i.e. what drugs are involved), it's difficult to know whether the issue could be managed without prescription medication. There are acupuncture techniques which can help a person deal with addictive behaviors, but drugs like meth and cocaine do not typically respond well to this type of intervention.

The best approach is often a combination of prescription medication combined with therapy and other non-medication type therapies like acupuncture.

If you're otherwise healthy, and the mobility issue is not the result of an injury then talking to a physical therapist or an athletic trainer would likely be beneficial. Either one should be able to give you some exercises and stretches which will improve your mobility.

Assuming your daughter is under 18, time and maybe some oatmeal baths to help with the itch. If this appears to be a severe case (i.e. there is substantial rash and/or there are blisters on the face or near the eyes), please get seen by your primary care or at an urgent care.

Sometimes fixed, sometimes managed. A lot is going to depend on how severe your anxiety is.

Most cases of acute bronchitis are either viral or caused by irritants like cigarette smoke. Viral infection cannot be treated by antibiotic therapy and smoking is a lifestyle choice. So, yes, you could theoretically resolve bronchitis naturally - either by waiting for the virus to run it's course or avoiding smoke and minimizing exposure to air pollutants.

If this is more along the lines of chronic bronchitis, there are still things you can to do minimize the impact on your life. Staying away from smoke, minimizing your exposure to air pollutants, and using acupuncture/herbal medicine/OTC meds to help clear mucus and dilate the bronchi.

Sometimes anger and anxiety are related, sometimes they aren't.

As to whether anxiety can go away on it's own, again, sometimes. Most of the time you're going to have to expend some effort to understand what causes the anxious feelings to arise and why anger is your response to those feelings. Therapy is an excellent place to explore these issues.

Acupuncture and Chinese medicine can support therapy and help to manage things by down regulating your central nervous system.

In time, you can probably reduce the overhead in terms of anxiety and develop strategies for managing break through anxiety and anger.

Sometimes, yes, hyperthyroidism can be treated naturally. It's not my preference though. I prefer to use prescription meds plus Chinese medicine. We're able to manage thyroid levels down more quickly that way. Usually we'll hit a point where the prescription med can be withdrawn or reduced.

What's going to help with chronic knee pain is going to depend heavily on what's causing the chronic knee pain. Is this a ligament strain? Tendon or muscle sprain or tear? Meniscus issue? Cartilage loss/osteo-arthritis? Residual pain from previous surgery?

Chronic pain rarely "just happens". There's a history to what's going on, and without that information there's not a lot I can offer in terms of potential solutions.

If you haven't done so already, get with your primary care provider and at least get an x-ray. We won't be able to see soft tissue on an x-ray, but sometimes we can make educated inferences based on what we can see. Knowing what's going on in the joint will help figure out the best course of treatment.

The problem with primary hypertension is: no one knows what causes it. Since we don't know the cause, it's hard to say whether or not it can be treated with dietary change or what kind of dietary change might be necessary.

You could try eating magnesium rich foods or adding a magnesium supplement to see if that brings your blood pressure down enough.

Chinese medicine and acupuncture have a pretty good track record with hypertension. In the Chinese system, there are multiple different potential causes so you'd need to see someone who understands that and knows how to differentiate the diagnosis to get you the most effective treatment. In other words, a chiropractor or a physical therapist are likely not going to be much help. You need someone who attended and graduated from a school of Chinese medicine and is licensed as an acupuncturist.

What is qi? What about the wisdom tooth removal process would lead you to believe yours is "out of balance"?

Most modern western interpretations of the Chinese character we pronounce as "qi" are fundamentally flawed/inaccurate. It's a term/idea/understanding that we probably should have adopted rather than attempted to translate.

That being said, if you're not experiencing any residual pain and there's no infection at the removal site, there's little call to do anything from a treatment perspective.

A lot is going to depend on where, exactly, in the knee you're experiencing the pain and what, exactly, is the cause of the pain. If this is something like osteoarthritis and you're already at the point where the cartilage is gone and you're bone on bone in that joint, acupuncture can manage the pain to a degree, but it's probably never going away.

Your first stop should be your primary care provider for at least an x-ray of the joint. Having some understanding of what the problem is will help to level set expectations about possible treatment outcomes.

Allergy to what? How severe? How long have you experienced the symptoms? What symptoms do you experience?

If this is something along the lines of seasonal allergies, acupuncture and Chinese medicine can often help. In time, seasonal allergy can often be reduced to the point that it's not a major life event. I used acupuncture and herbal medicine to manage my seasonal allergy and it took 2 years to get them to the point that I don't notice the season change.

If this is a food allergy, acupuncture can still help. For a time you will need to avoid the food item or items that are causing the issue.

If this is some other allergic type reaction, I'd need a lot more information.

Yes, acupuncture would certainly be on the table as a way to manage the pain and discomfort associated with carpal tunnel. I have quite a few carpal tunnel patients that I work with, most of them do quite well with acupuncture.

If you think you are pregnant and may be having a miscarriage, please go straight to the nearest emergency room.

Your images could be clotted blood, could be pieces of placenta.

I've been studying and practicing acupuncture for 20+ years myself. In that time, I've had one patient who had an allergy to surgical stainless steel. The needles weren't painful for her, but after treatment she would have large, red welts around the needle locations which took 2-3 days to resolve.

I have a few guesses here:

1. Your patient has a severe allergy to surgical stainless steel.

2. Your patient has been in chronic pain long enough that he has become centrally sensitized and his brain is now interpreting most signals as pain signals.

3. The acupuncturist is needling too deeply and/or has one track they use to treat issues like this and can't think outside the box enough to come up with another way that fits this patient better.

As far as the herbs go - it's very easy to miss on a Chinese diagnosis and get the wrong herbal formula. Most folks see "inflammation", think "heat" and go for heat clearing herbs. Sometimes this is the case, and sometimes it's a lot more complicated than that.

I'd have to see/evaluate the patient to give any more/better advice in this case. My best suggestion would be to see if you can find an acupuncturist who practices either Tung/Tan or has more of an ortho/sports medicine focus. You need someone who can either treat the painful area without needling in the painful area or someone who can address specific structure in the painful area with a high degree of accuracy. Unfortunately, most acupuncturists practice so-called "TCM" acupuncture and this leaves them limited when local needles either don't solve the problem, cause more problems, or both.