Acupuncture for Pain and Stress
What is stress?
Stress is a physical response to an external stimulus. It is neither good nor bad, per se, but it is essential to change. When we lift weights, we stress our muscles to adapt to the new weight by changing their size and function (hypertrophy). When we jog, we ask our cardiovascular system to adapt by becoming more efficient and pumping more blood.
Even though stress comes from outside of ourselves, the experience is altered by our mind to be of much greater importance than it is.
When is stress damaging to our health?
Stress damages our health when it creates a situation where we are constantly in a fight or flight response. This response is normal when we are physically in danger but abnormal in day-to-day life. Also known as the sympathetic response, it prepares our body to keep us alive in the most deadly situations by diverting resources such as energy and blood flow to the necessary places. The heart races to pump more blood, the pupils dilate so we can see better, and all resources are diverted away from digestion. However, these superpowers cannot last long and come at a significant cost if they persist longer than necessary.
Modern life creates stress that activates our sympathetic response but on a lower and more chronic level. These stressors are well known to everyone - traffic and commuting, challenging work deadlines, financial problems - but they affect everyone differently. Common issues are stomach problems such as gastritis, reflux, and ulcers. Heart palpitations, irregular rhythm, and shortness of breath can be caused by stress, as well as bowel issues such as diarrhea and constipation. It would not be excessive to say that almost every disease that occurs later in life is influenced by stress.
Unfortunately, modern medicine confuses these issues with problems with the organs themselves. The treatment for stomach ulcers, for example, is to reduce the acid in the stomach. However, the cause of the increased acidity is stress, not an intrinsic problem with the stomach. Irritable bowel syndrome is a classic stress response that has no organic cause and can be found through imaging, blood tests, or biopsy. It is “idiopathic,” which is a fancy way of saying, “We do not know why.”
How do we reduce stress?
The most effective way to eliminate stress from daily life is not to be affected. This is a monumental task that is almost incompatible with modern life. There are, however, ways to change how we perceive external events and train our bodies to respond more positively to stress that our minds create. We can train ourselves to be more resilient to perceived threats to our ego through methods developed thousands of years ago. Some involve training the mind through study and meditation (Buddhism, Stoicism, Taoism); others include training the body to have greater awareness and control of our movements and muscle tension (martial arts, yoga). Modern versions of these ancient practices include cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness practices, and various movement therapies.
Although we cannot avoid stress, we can change how we perceive and react to it. How we perceive stress is related to our mindset, and our lifestyle ultimately determines our reaction.
How can Contemporary Acupuncture help reduce the symptoms of stress?
Contemporary Acupuncture takes a holistic view of how stress affects a person. This means that we evaluate the entire person and not only the complaint. Most people come to us for anxiety and related symptoms, such as depression, insomnia, digestive or cardiovascular issues. We understand that these symptoms do not indicate a problem with the brain, bowel, or heart; they manifest the stress response. Therefore, taking an antidepressant, sleeping pill, or antacid will only mask the symptoms. The goal of our treatment is twofold: to eliminate or significantly reduce the symptoms and to create a body (and mind) that is more resilient and adaptable to stress.
How do acupuncture and herbal medicine work to reduce the symptoms of stress and create resilience?
Acupuncture and herbal medicine function as adaptogens. They help the body adapt to the environment by letting things happen more quickly. The primary action of acupuncture is to relax the tissue. This has the function of unwinding constricted areas, such as tight muscle, and the secondary effect of increasing blood flow from relaxing blood vessels. Fresh blood brings oxygen, nutrients, hormones, and inflammatory mediators. Injury or disease in an area is always accompanied by constriction of the surrounding tissues as a protective mechanism; acupuncture opens this area up for change and healing. This has a remarkable effect on restoring normal function to an organ by allowing it to do what it was meant to do without the influence of an abnormal stress response. When this is applied to the bowel system, there is a significant “unblocking.”
Acupuncture also has a homeostatic function, which means it restores balance to an organ that is hyper or hypofunctioning. In other words, if the heart beats too rapidly, it will reduce the heart rate, and vice versa. This homeostatic function comes from “unblocking” areas of the organ to allow it to function normally.
When the entire body is well-balanced, we are less prone to injury and illness. Each part of the body works with other parts to form a cohesive unit that is flexible to change and, therefore, resilient to disease. A green sapling is less likely to snap in the wind than a stiff and heavy branch. There are no blockages in the body no areas of tension that pull other parts out of line. This is a common theme in Eastern philosophy because it was developed by observation of what is successful in nature. Likewise, if our minds are flexible, we are much less likely to conflict with others and create stress.
How does acupuncture help with reducing pain?
One of the most common reasons to seek acupuncture is to treat pain. This is due to the unique effects of acupuncture on the site of pain (the local effect) and acupuncture done on a different area of the body for the same pain (the distal effect).
Local needling (acupuncture done at the pain site) mainly causes mechanical and hormonal changes in the area of pain. Acupuncture causes an alteration in sensation in the area, as proven by the gate theory of acupuncture, similar to an analgesic effect. In addition, inserting an object into the body attracts cells designed to battle a foreign invader, such as macrophages and associated inflammatory mediators. There may also be mechanical alterations of the tissue as collagen fibers entwine around the needle. Local needling is limited in its effectiveness, and anyone seeking acupuncture for pain or any other reason should be wary of practitioners who only insert needles into the affected area.
Distal needling is one of the most effective treatments for pain because it relaxes the tissues in the injured area. This immediate tissue relaxation can be felt by both the person getting the acupuncture and the acupuncturist and causes instant pain reduction. There is no other way to describe this than to feel it for yourself.
The science of acupuncture
How this occurs is still unclear to allopathic medicine; what we know from both empirical studies and the experience of thousands of years is that inserting a needle into a tissue changes the quality of the tissue. That change is transferred lengthwise along the limb or torso to another body part. In other words, the tissue acts as a chain of communication between different body parts that has yet to be described by biomedical science. The only form of communication between body parts that biomedicine acknowledges is what they can see from dissection: the nervous system.
Acupuncture works on an entirely different system, which is the connective tissue system. It would not be premature to say that this system forms the underlying foundation or scaffolding of the entire body. On the other hand, the nervous system is made up of nerves that we can clearly see and touch. These nerves all originate or end in the spinal cord or brain, which provides us with voluntary control of our muscles and involuntary control of our organs. The connective tissue system is different; it is not under voluntary control but connects one part of the body with another, forming a truly “holistic” organism. We cannot quickly dissect it because it envelops and permeates every body part like a web of plastic wrap that we use to cover our food. This tissue is usually discarded during dissection - we tend to focus on things like muscle and nerves - but it forms an integral part of our body as a whole organism, not just a sum of the parts.
The connective tissue system connects one part of the body with another without passing through our central nervous system. For example, it connects the foot with the head. How do we know this? We learn through physical dissection of the body that there is a continuous line of connective tissue from the bottom of the foot to the heel, up the back of the leg, passing through the back, up the nape of the neck, over the head and reaching the inner corner of the eye. In certain medical practices, this is called the posterior chain. However, it usually refers to the posterior chain of muscles (because connective tissue has not been recognized as a system). However, this so-called “posterior chain” was described over 2,000 years ago in ancient acupuncture texts as the Bladder channel, and it follows the pathway from the pinky toe to the inner corner (canthus) of the eye. We have been lucky enough to see a case where the patient, who was unaware of the existence of the Bladder channel, described a specific type of pain that followed the channel exactly, from the foot, up the back, to the inner canthus of the eye! There are many cases where the patient describes the acupuncture channel in great detail without knowledge of the channel defined in the texts.
This knowledge of the channels and how one part of the body affects another part is the core of acupuncture. The insertion of a needle into a distal part of the body affects the tension of the tissue in the target area. As we mentioned above, this targeted relaxation of tissue leads to decreased pain and increased blood flow, reducing inflammation and nerve irritation. Nerve irritation is primarily mechanical; that is, the nerve is physically being irritated or compressed. Relaxation of the tissues around the nerve removes the source of irritation, removes the burning, radiates pain down the limb, and restores sensation to the numb areas.
The acupuncture channels reflect lines of tension in the body, particularly from the limbs to the torso, the torso to the head, and vice versa. Therefore, it is not uncommon to feel a “pulling” sensation from the thigh or as far as the foot to the lower abdomen or a “burning” sensation in the stomach followed by a frontal headache. Some people are sensitive enough to define the line of tension, its origin, and termination, which is of great help to the acupuncturist.
The idea of homeostasis redefines health as a body free of restrictions rather than disease. The body has an intrinsic equilibrium that it always seeks to reach, yet injury or disease creates restrictions that prevent optimal functioning. This is often a physical issue in which the body contracts the tissue around an injured area to prevent further injury. This is essential in the short term, but it also delays healing and can persist for years, eventually pulling other body parts out of line.
A simple case can be seen in lower back pain that originated as a sprain from an awkward movement that has become chronic. The tension in the lower back has persisted long after the memory of how the injury occurred, and that tension begins to spread down to the back of the pelvis and hip. With prolonged immobility, lack of blood flow, and further tightening of the surrounding muscles, the nerves that exit the tailbone become compressed as they travel down the leg, causing numbness and burning to the hamstring. Since the hamstring's movement and stretching becomes less comfortable, the back of the knee and the calf begin to tighten. Soon, the body starts to favor the other side of the body to bear weight when standing and walking. Hip and knee pain develop on the opposite leg from compensation. Many years later, the lack of blood flow and stiffness of the lower back and hips place more stress on both knees, leading to pain. At this point, most medical professionals would simply call this “arthritis” as an umbrella term for inflammation of the joints. Still, the real cause is immobility or restriction of the body for prolonged periods. Any joint requires lubrication for the moving parts to slide against one another; we do not simply lose lubrication due to age or some unknown cause—our joints age due to restriction and immobility from overuse or chronic injury. Taking anti-inflammatory medication for arthritis is like trying to fix a wheel bearing by changing the engine oil - the car might run a little better, but it does nothing for the wheel.
