“How does acupuncture help with anxiety?”

Hello. Acupuncture helps reduce anxiety in a few ways. It helps move the body out of a pattern of chronic "fight or flight" mode (sympathetic nervous system response) into "rest and digest" (parasympathetic nervous system). It also helps reduce cortisol, considered the stress hormone. It can help reduce symptoms of anxiety including racing or pounding heart, sensation of pressure in the chest, racing thoughts, difficulty sleeping, panic attacks, etc. Over time the goal is to help the patient feel like they have a more balanced physical and mental response to stressors/triggers. The typical treatment recommendation is one treatment per week for 8 weeks, and then we see if we can reduce the treatments to

There are calming points in our body with Acupuncture which produces serotonin, a happiness hormone.

As is true for allopathic (Western) medicine, Chinese medicine recognizes anxiety as a sign that something is out of balance for the person experiencing it. While medications can help decrease the symptom, invariably some type of therapy is necessary to address the mental/psychological aspect of the anxiety and to provide ways to heal or at least manage it. Acupuncture is based in helping a person's energies to get back into balance so that the body, mind and spirit can function optimally. There are specific acupuncture point combinations that are very effective in relieving acute anxiety, but a skilled practitioner will talk to you and check some physical things to try to figure out the underlying energy imbalance that is contributing to the anxiety. That way they can use acupuncture to treat the root cause and not just the symptom of anxiety. Peace & Health, Karolyn R. Mauro, MD

I need to know your symptoms.

Acupuncture, a traditional Chinese medical practice, entails the insertion of fine needles into specific points on the body to address a variety of health issues and enhance overall wellness. Various theories suggest that acupuncture may aid in managing anxiety by regulating neurotransmitters, reducing stress, balancing the HPA axis, promoting relaxation, and harmonizing energy flow. If you are contemplating acupuncture for anxiety, it is recommended to seek guidance from a certified acupuncturist.

Good-afternoon, 1. Received. Thank you. 2. Acupuncture does help anxiety by balance body energy flow and yin/yang. 3. Please talk to your family doctor or your acupuncturist to make sure no other medical issue to cause anxiety. 4. If you shall have any other questions, please feel free to contact my office at (562)698-3008. David

Hello and Thank you for your question. Anxiety is looked at in our medicine as excessive Fire rising upward and disturbing the Shen (Heart-Spirit). It is often accompanied by cold extremities, especially the feet and possibly red face and heat sensations in the chest and face. The goal of Chinese Medicine is to re-establish balance in the body and mind, which in itself is very relaxing. Often patients coming in with different complaints are surprised at how relaxed they are and some even fall asleep during their treatment. While acupuncture alone can effectively reduce anxiety symptoms, acupuncture paired with customized herbal formulas can help retain this balance between treatments. Please feel free to reach to us in the office at 858-450-0620 to speak to one of our practitioners for more information, or you can always take a look at our website at myacupuncturist.com <http://myacupuncturist.com/>. Thank you again and wishing you Peace, Love and Light, Julie Simonton, L. Ac. Clinic Director Acupuncture Center of La Jolla 8950 Villa La Jolla Dr Suite B-129 La Jolla, CA 92037 You can also Follow us on Instagram @aclj_acupuncture

Well, acupuncture will nicely relaxing you.

I'm not sure how to answer HOW it fixes anxiety, I just know that it does work very well. In fact, it's probably my favorite thing to treat because it does work so well.

It would take about 8 years to explain how
But yes acupuncture can help insomnia

When it comes to acupuncture, answering the "how" question is very tricky. Taken as a whole, Chinese medicine is coming at the body and health issues from the standpoint of systems theory. Conventional science/medicine is coming at the body and health issues largely from the standpoint of reductionism.

Systems theory and reductionism represent one of those few times where either one is correct or the other is - they cannot both be right at the same time. There are ideas in systems theory, mainly the concept of emergence, that stand in direct contradiction to reductionism. Emergent properties are properties that appear when systems are brought into interaction and those properties are completely unpredicted by the action of either system in isolation (the whole is greater than the sum of its parts). Reductionism, on the other hand, claims that complex systems can be decomposed to component parts and understood as the simple interaction of those pieces (the whole is only the sum of its parts).

The reality is that systems theory provides superior answers to our questions in most contexts. Why medicine has not yet caught up with everyone else is an open question.

And herein lies the issue: we're trying to understand a medical system that is built on systems theory by using reductionism. It's a square peg-round hole problem. To put it more simply - we aren't even asking the right questions yet in most acupuncture studies (we're not asking the right questions in most biological studies if I'm being honest).

The honest answer is: no one knows what the "how" of acupuncture is, no one has really asked that question or looked at it in a fundamental way. We could talk about neurotransmitters and down-regulation of the central nervous system, but that's only one level deep. How is it that a handful of solid, stainless steel needles should exert those effects? We don't know, we aren't even asking that question. In reality, in the reductionistic model, that question doesn't make sense.

Here's the thing, though, we have a lot of drugs - FDA approved drugs - on the market that we do not know how, exactly, they work. Almost all antidepressants, some anti-anxiolytics, most anti-psychotics, and many others. So, if you were to treat your anxiety with prescription meds, it's even odds whether or not we understand how those drugs are exerting their action.

Just because we don't understand exactly how something works doesn't mean we can't observe it working and use it as a solution to the problem.

Acupuncture combined with herbs, and sometimes massage, will help relieve your stress and help with anxiety.