“Frequency of acupuncture?”
Female | 42 years old
14 Answers
Not all acupuncturists are created equal... if after a few weeks of treatment you feel no improvement, try another one. Also, ask about your practitioner's training and experience level... make sure they actually went to school for acupuncture/Chinese medical training and aren't a Chiropractor or M.D. or Physical Therapist who took a weekend seminar to "learn" it. Best of luck to you.
Live Happy,
Michael
Alexandre Hillairet, DAOM.
As the effectiveness and results all depend on the each person's condition and health, you should ask the doctor for the frequency of the treatment. Some may require 5 or 3 per week depending on your condition at the moment even with same diagnosis. Please consult your doctor.
Sincerely,
Scott Sang In Lee
Warmly,
Natalie Ramsey, MS LAc
Yes, in general more treatments closer in frequency tend to be more effective in most cases.
Kind Regards,
B
In the US though, most patients don't immediately think of acupuncture when they have a problem and usually they come to us last rather than first. Since acupuncturists aren't seeing the same patient numbers, they have to charge more in order to make a living. So the model we've adopted in the west is built around one treatment per week.
Setting aside the money issue, what works best? To be honest, when patients are experiencing severe or extreme symptoms, multiple treatments per week, at least in my experience, often provides superior results. I treat mostly pain conditions and my general rule of thumb is: if a patient's pain is routinely above 7-8 on a 10 point scale, I prefer to start with 2-3 treatments per week for one to two weeks. After that we can usually drop back to one treatment per week and continue making progress.
If I were working with you, I'd probably group your symptoms into two buckets:
1. Fatigue and weakness
2. Tinnitus
I'd then suggest working on the fatigue and weakness first as, in my experience, these tend to respond faster to acupuncture than tinnitus. If your experience of fatigue and weakness seems severe or extreme (and it kinda does), then 2 treatments per week for a couple of weeks might be what you need to get some traction on these issues.
Tinnitus is a problem that, again in my experience, doesn't respond as quickly to acupuncture. I wouldn't try doubling down on treatments expecting a faster resolution on this particular problem.
What I wouldn't expect (and, in my opinion, what few US acupuncturists should expect) is for you to pay full price for each treatment and come in for more than one session per week indefinitely. There should be a clearly articulated end-goal for multiple sessions per week and your provider should have a solid plan for getting to that goal and then ramping down to a different treatment interval.