Most of us have probably heard about TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) and acupuncture in Jacksonville, and a significant number have actually tried them; however, what many do not realize, is that these healing methods have benefits that go beyond the mere treatment of their conditions.
1. Traditional Chinese Medicine is a very specific system of healing that provides detailed diagnoses for common issues than Western Medicine. This can be perfectly illustrated in the case of the common cold.
Have you ever observed that each person gets a cold in his or her own way?
All of us suffer from colds every now and then. We say “I have a cold” based on the standpoint of Western medicine. In TCM, however, there can be a wide variety of colds with each having a different underlying cause. For instance you can have a “Wind Heat” or a “Wind Cold”, or even “Lung Heat”. To a practitioner of TCM, each case of cold is different and is treated differently. The practitioner prescribes a unique type of herbal remedy and uses a different acupuncture treatment to address each of the 15 or more kinds of colds. This healing system offers a much more accurate diagnosis and a much more accurate solution.
A lot of teachers are terrified of catching a cold, but since they deal with many young students they have no choice but to be exposed to colds on a daily basis. One client of mine who’s also a teacher says:
“I can’t afford to be sick since I’m an instructor. I need to take preventative measures whenever a flu or cold is circulating around at school. Nevertheless, I still succumb to the illness every now and again. My experiences from catching the flu or cold made me realize that, in order to recover from flu or cold, the quickest possible treatment is to undergo an acupuncture treatment and then follow it up with Chinese herbal formulas.”
He was intrigued about why she wasn’t prescribed the same herbal remedy each time he got ill. I told him that there are a wide variety of colds in TCM, and that we correlate both the acupuncture therapy and the herbal remedy to the specific symptoms we observe. A treatment for “Wind Heat” for a patient with a “Wind Cold” problem will not solve the illness and may even actually exacerbate the symptoms. It’s similar to a case in Western Medicine where a physician uses a remedy for a bacterial infection to treat a virus. It not only won’t solve the problem, it also may cause problems in the patient’s stomach.
The best thing about TCM is that the teacher patient recovered faster than her colleagues which she thrillingly reported:
“When it comes to acupuncture and TCM, the amazing thing is I always recover more quickly than my colleagues who have sought treatment from Western medicine, and after I have completely recovered, I actually feel even stronger than before.”
2. Traditional Chinese Medicine and acupuncture are holistic therapies: it considers the whole person and takes into account the things happening in his whole life.
Medical exams from another patient of mine who was suffering from painful back pain showed no cause for his ailment. After we talked for a while, it became obvious that the real cause was his job. His employer recently significantly shortened his work hours and he became extremely anxious about how he would pay his bills. He really sought to solve the problem with his job and what steps he needed to do to address the problem. Aside from using acupuncture to treat his back pain, we worked together to devise a plan of action to remedy his job problem.
Oftentimes, pain is the way our body tells us that we need to pay attention to something, whether it’s arthritis, a physical injury, or some other condition.
Another patient I saw suffered from severe arthritis. He was a professional athlete but now retired and was experiencing arthritis in his legs and hips. The pain became so severe that he had a difficult time walking. I questioned Henry about his diet, because I had a feeling that perhaps there was something in his diet that was responsible for the kind of arthritis he was experiencing. When I questioned him about his diet, I asked whether he drank alcohol, ate a lot of lot of dairy products or a lot of sugar. He confessed that he did take a significant amount of alcohol, and he asked if I wanted him to cut back. I told him, “Actually, I wanted you to try a little experiment here. I recommend that you reduce your alcohol consumption and see what happens.” So he very meaningfully reduced his alcohol intake, and he observed that the more he reduced it, the more the swelling and pain went down in his hips and leg. He was willing to make the changes and was able to see the connection between his lifestyle and the result he didn’t want. He decided finally to reduce his alcohol intake on an ongoing basis so that it could help relieve his pain and increase his ability to walk.
3. My patients are often excited to discover that certain Chinese diagnoses that are not used in other types of medicine can actually describe their problems quite accurately.
One female patient of mine was an extremely health conscious lady. She told me that she recently visited an older sister in another state. After spending a week at the home of her sister, she returned home suffering from a very unusual cough. She told me that visiting her sister always made her tense and stressful and this visit was no exception. Her cough was puzzling because it felt as if she had something in her throat and she can’t get it to go down her throat and neither could she cough it up. I told her that this is a classical case of “plum pit throat,” which is a condition that exists in traditional Chinese medicine. She was astonished that her condition had a name. I treated her with acupuncture treatment and Chinese herbs which worked marvelously.
Another instance of a TCM diagnosis and treatment that proved extremely effective involved a young graduate student who was suffering from strange digestive symptoms associated with stress. Symptoms included stabbing, fixed pain. She underwent every possible medical test for her symptoms, including an endoscopy to verify that she wasn’t suffering from stomach cancer; however, there was no one who could come up with a conclusive diagnosis. One of my very skillful and experienced teachers diagnosed this young woman as suffering from “blood stagnation” which he cured with a couple of Chinese herbal formulas and acupuncture. The symptoms that plagued her for over a year vanished entirely.
4. More often than not, Chinese herbal formulas are more effective than medications and utilize non-pharmaceutical solutions. A recent patient who suffered from extreme work-related stress reported that she was experiencing a lot of UTIs or urinary tract infections. She would get a secondary infection whenever she used antibiotics to address her symptoms. This is because the antibiotics destroyed both the bad and good bacteria in her body. She got better faster and never got a secondary infection when I used acupuncture and Chinese herbal antibiotics to treat her.
Compared to conventional Western medicine Traditional Chinese Medicine is a more powerful form of treatment because it considers the person as a whole and takes into account everything that is happening in a person’s life. A lot of the diagnoses and recommendations for common illnesses provided by TCM are more specific compared to those provided by Western Medicine. TCM even includes diagnoses and treatments for problems not identified by Western Medicine. Chinese herbal remedies provide non-pharmaceutical solutions that are often more potent than pharmaceutical remedies.