EntriesWow, a new blog: a clean white sheet of virtual paper in front of me. So, what’s this blog all about? Let me first tell you something about myself. After being a physiotherapist for some years, I found out that there are a lot of patients who I couldn’t help in any way. At first I thought it was just my lack of knowledge as a starting therapist. But all the courses I took and studies I did didn’t give me insight in what the real problem was. So I decided there had to be more. And I found it in acupuncture.
The problem with western medicine is that it is so specialised that we tend to forget the person behind the injury. For instance if an achilles tendon injury wouldn’t heal, I would not only check the tendon, the muscle of the calve, but also the way that patient moves in his foot, knee, hip and lower back. If I’m a good physiotherapist I would also check if there is no problem in his central nerve system.
In acupuncture I go a bit further than that. We look not only at the body, but also at the mind, the social interacting and even the climate (there is a reason why all of the elderly US lives in Florida). Let’s demonstrate that by a runner with an achilles tendon injury:
The tendons are part of the liver-yin energy. Emotions for the liver are stress, anger, frustration. The yin energy is the nutritional energy. If a person doesn’t have enough rest, the body is not able to nutrate all it’s cells properly. If our patient has a 50 hour managing job, we can assume he experiences stress and probably doesn’t take enough rest. He will never get over his injury, even if he gets the best physiotherapy or other therapy.
In acupuncture I would nourish his liver-yin with Chinese herbal formulas, take away his stress with acupuncture and probaly place some needles in his tendon or muscle for local relaxation and improvement of the blood flow.
So far for the example. This is just an illustration of how acupuncture can benefit your life. With this blog I want to show patients that they have other options, I want to show praticioners that there is more to a patient than just an injury and I would like to show the world that we all can benefit from the ancient traditions on which acupuncture is based.
