Acupuncture As Seen On The Today Show

My morning ritual usually starts with either a 5:15 am the alarm for Erin or myself to go to the gym, or a baby monitor going off sometime around 6:30 am.

On the mornings I don’t go to the gym I first make a run for the coffeemaker, get the kids out of bed and usually turn on the Today show or a music station. With the Today Show, we at least get an idea of how the weather is going to be for the day. I’ll be honest, commercial TV, and especially the Today Show, drive me nuts! The programming, commercials, and shows all have a decidedly medical slant. This week Today Show has been mainly medical with a concentration in pain management.

I had had to turn the TV off most mornings because I seriously considered throwing the remote through it when they were talking about treatments for low back pain, neck pain, and migraines. Today I was pleasantly surprised when they were profiling “alternative” treatments, like acupuncture, in a very positive light. They were even talking about needleless acupuncture.

The doctor demonstrating the acupuncture did a great job showing how to needlepoint and also showed a punctureless cold laser light that he used to stimulate points. It is a common misconception that you have to use needles to effectively do acupuncture.

We probably should talk a bit about what acupuncture is before we go much further. Acupuncture can be dated back as far as 8,000 years, and some have stated that it's as old as humanity itself, around 100,000 years. Acupuncture is possibly the most clinically meaningful portion of a holistic, total person approach to practice. To understand real healthcare, chiropractic, and Applied Kinesiology you will need to have an understanding of the philosophy and theory of acupuncture. Acupuncture is one of the treatment modalities of what has become known as Traditional Chinese Medicine or TCM.

The main uses of acupuncture in TCM are to move Qi, or Chi, which is the bodies life force (our divine spark) that makes us all individual, through the channels and organs, removing blockages in the channels that are also called meridians. There are 12 classic meridians that are related to our organs. These traditional meridians are predominantly found on the surface of the body and have numerous points that can have far-reaching effects both in the body and in the organ systems they're related. Typically when I talk about meridians, I refer to them as a backup generator for the organ.

When the primary systems start to break down, the Meridian picks up the slack and helps the body heal and fight off pathology. There are many different ways the points could be stimulated. Of course, using a needle or a homogenous wavelength of light (Cold Laser) are the most widely known, but there are other options. An Acu-bead or patch could be used for low-level, long-term stimulation, (these have been used to help with stopping smoking or craving controls), you can also tap or rub the specific points with your hands.

There's a meridian that runs down the spine and has critical and powerful acupuncture points. These are called associated points, and they are related to every other meridian in the body. If you have ever received a chiropractic adjustment, then you have had these points stimulated. I honestly don't think I could treat a patient without chiropractic and acupuncture. Utilizing Applied Kinesiology and manual muscle testing we have determined relationships between all of the meridians and specific muscle tests.

This allows us, I feel, to make the proper assessment of the meridians and get much faster results without the need of puncturing the skin. Acupuncture gives us the window to the actual cause of what is going wrong with the body at that precise moment in time and helps us find ways to support it's natural healing abilities, thus allowing us to treat the person and the cause of the symptoms, not just put a band-aid on the symptoms.

This is part of the reason why doctors using Applied Kinesiology and muscle testing typically don’t have to see patients three times a week for six weeks. 

I applaud the Today Show for thinking out of the box this morning!