Posts Tagged ‘herbal supplements’
Perhaps you feel lethargic and unmotivated. Or you may be the opposite – perpetually anxious, stressed and on-the-go. Researchers of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine would simply shake their heads and offer you a spot in an acupuncture clinic, where the practice of using needles to stimulate certain acupuncture points is used to provide relief for all sorts of ailments from headaches to alcoholism. For years, psychologists have scratched their heads about mind over matter, but the proof is in the final results: it works.
Many Western medical practitioners are baffled by how acupuncture works and therefore dispute its validity. However, there are several theories about why acupuncture and Chinese medicine is, in fact, successful at curing certain illnesses. In the “Gate Control” theory, it’s believed that slow-moving pain signals follow the body’s internal highway. By applying the needle, we can generate endorphins that move much quicker and push the pain signals out of the way. Because the slow pain is blocked in the pushing and shoving of signals, the pain sensation never actually reaches the brain.
Another Chinese theory is called the “Electrical” theory, which says that the body is always discharging slight magnetic energy and that Chinese acupuncture actually works by manipulating the body’s electromagnetic fields, altering chemical neurotransmitters in the process. In 1999, British doctors found that collagen was a good conductor of electricity — and Dr. Mae Won Ho concluded that “the kind of conducting water channels that more or less follow the collagen fibres may correspond to the so-called meridians of the acupuncture channels. So when you put a needle in you are giving a local electrical stimulation which then enables this positive electricity to be conducted to some distant sites.”
Cancer patients undergoing chemo have started turning to acupuncture and Chinese medicine to cure negative side effects, like nausea or headaches. Hard-to-cure problems like osteoarthritis, asthma, drug addiction and fibromyalgia chronic pain have all been treated with acupuncture or Chinese herbal supplements in the past. Regardless of how it works, it’s a safer, less expensive alternative to visiting your general practitioner and local pharmacist, even with Western health insurance plans covering prescription medicines.