Acupuncture

How does acupuncture work?

This is the most common question we hear. We have 2 ways to answer it, which we call the traditional and the modern explanations.

Traditional

When you attend acupuncture college, this is the explanation you are most likely to be taught. It is draws on ideas presented in the oldest and most highly respected text in Chinese medicine, the Huang Di Nei Jing or Yellow Emperors Inner Canon, written over two thousand years ago. It introduces something called “qi” (pronounced “chee”), often translated into English as “energy” or “life force” but these terms are poor matches so we prefer to stick with “qi”. Qi is described as circulating through the body in channels or meridians. It interacts with your physical body- anything that effects your physical body will affect the flow of qi and vice-versa. So, if you have ill-health it means the flow of qi has been adversely affected and it is the goal of acupuncture to correct that and thereby restore you to wellness. Neither qi nor the channels it flows through can be directly seen or measured, so science has been unable to verify its existence. Some people have a hard time believing something works if science can’t explain it. For those people, our second explanation may be more helpful.

Modern

This explanation is borrowed from Dr. Yoshio Manaka, one of the most influential acupuncturists of the 20th century. He begins with the idea that we evolved from single celled organisms, and that those organisms had regulatory mechanisms that were vital to their survival and well-being. As they evolved into more complex multi-cellular organisms their regulatory mechanisms adapted and became more complex. Keep in mind that nature doesn’t throw away anything useful; the regulatory mechanism for a microscopic creature serves as the foundation for whatever that creature evolves into. As complex as the human body is, our metabolism, our well-being, and our perceptions of the world are all dependent on systems that were derived from the simplest forms of life. Science has done a good job of identifying the larger regulatory pathways that have evolved relatively recently, but the older systems remain buried under layers of evolution. These systems are still in place helping to maintain us, we just can’t see them. Acupuncture works with these aspects of our bodies.