How Does Acupuncture Work

This question is asked by most of my patients and is often hard to answer. There are many different explanations for how acupuncture works. Pick up three books and you may find three different answers. The doctors of ancient times tried to explain how things worked without our modern tools of discovery.

Many people want to discard all of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) simply because some of the ideas have been considered inaccurate or inadequate. That would be like discarding all of modern, allopathic medicine because Galen believed that the circulatory system was open-ended and blood dissipated in the extremities based on tissue needs and did not return to the heart.

New ideas

Modern scholars are re-examining the ancient TCM texts (a little like reading a medical text in Shakespearean English) with a more liberal interpretation of the older words to get a new sense of what the doctors of that time were attempting to explain. These ideas are being melded with modern scientific understanding of the body. We need to remember that we are still discovering new things about the body. Recent research has discovered blood vessels in what was thought to be solid bone.

Taking these new ideas into account, here are some explanations on how acupuncture works. At it’s simplest, acupuncture helps to speed the healing process and promote recovery through the following mechanisms:

How it works

1. Reduce Inflammation. Acupuncture decreases the body’s ability to perpetuate the inflammatory cascade.
2. Reduce Pain. Acupuncture stimulates the release of endorphins (natural pain killers), enkephalins and other neurotransmitters and hormones.
3. Decrease Muscle Spasm. Local needling releases chemicals in the body that softens muscle spasms.
4. Increase Blood Flow. Acupuncture signals the brain to increase blood flow to starved tissues. Partially via #3 as super tight muscles will “clamp down” on the arterioles and capillaries running through them and partially through vasodilation.
5. Repair Tissues. An acupuncture needle does tiny amounts of cell damage that cause the release of chemicals that signal the body to manufacture and mobilize cells that repair tissue damage.

And there you have it. The “nutshell” explanation of how acupuncture works. For more information this short video from Stephanie Irzyk of New Direction Natural Medicine also does a great job of explaining how acupuncture works.