Why I Love Acupuncture

  Being an acupuncturist, people assume I love acupuncture, but people are constantly asking, “How in the world did you end up doing acupuncture?”  It seems even more unlikely to have happened since I grew up in a very small town that had never had an acupuncturist.  I knew about acupuncture and had even seen it done at a young age because my family had used it to heal a variety of things. But the thought of ever doing acupuncture as a career had never crossed my mind even once. It wasn’t until my second year of college when I wrote a paper about Chinese Medicine that I really became interested in what it had to offer. After three years of studying acupuncture at the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine, the things that intrigued me when I first learned about it are same reasons I still love the medicine today. Here are a just few of the things I love about Oriental Medicine:

·         Nature: Oriental Medicine uses nature to explain and diagnose things going on in the body. For example, a redness of the skin may be ‘heat’ or an involuntary shaking of the body is addressed as ‘wind.’

·         Treating the unexplained: Since it was created thousands of years ago when there weren’t modern diagnoses, Chinese Medicine is designed to treat symptoms or patterns. This means that even if a person’s illness or symptoms can’t be labeled as a specific Western medicine diagnosis, a Chinese Medicine diagnosis can be given and treated with acupuncture, herbs, or other modalities.

·         Considers the entire body and a root cause: A Chinese Medicine diagnosis doesn’t just look at the one issue or symptom the patient is complaining about, but considers everything else going on in the body as well in order to look for a root cause to resolve. For example, if a person has neck pain it is a problem local to that area, but there may also be other internal causes that need to be treated as well.

·         Balance: Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine are all about balance- balance in the body, balance of yin and yang, and overall balance in life. This just makes sense to me because in general too much or too little of anything can be a problem.

·         It works!!: No matter what people may say about acupuncture and whether we know exactly how it works or not, the fact is it does work! While every person responds differently to any treatment, I watch it help and amaze people all the time!

And that is exactly why I love acupuncture and I love sharing it with people every day!

By: Jessica Tatieze, LAc, Skin Zen Acupuncture & Esthetics