Treating Pandemic Stress and Pain with Acupuncture
Treating Pandemic Stress and Pain with Acupuncture by Shane Rutkowski, L.Ac., Dipl. Ac., Owner of Sláinte Acupuncture, LLC
Imagine a smoke alarm that won’t stop going off. One of two things might happen. You’d either eventually attenuate to it and not notice any alarms or you’d become hypersensitive and completely on edge— jumping at every little sound. We don’t want to live in a world where alarm bells are constantly ringing but we also don’t want to rip the smoke alarm out of the wall either. Now imagine that a ball or a bird is flying towards your head—You tense in anticipation. Then, the object either hits or misses you, at which point you’d physically relax as the threat has passed. But what can you do if the threat isn’t physical? In this case, the body doesn’t always receive the signal that the threat has passed and therefore doesn’t know to relax. What then? That’s where acupuncture comes into play.
This survival-based hardware is intriguing and very necessary. All of these unconscious biological processes are very much tied into how much we perceive our environment to be safe. The last few years have taken a toll on our emotional and physical well-being. An important point to remember is that these stressors, threats, or perceptions of danger, whether real or imagined, have a very real physiological response. It’s why watching scary movies can be fun, but also cause very real muscle contractions when the jump scare occurs (Tremblay, 2019). It is also why East Asian Medicine incorporates the external environment and emotional landscape into its orthopedic assessments. Acupuncture has the unique ability to help the body complete the stress cycle.
How can acupuncture help to regulate the sympathetic nervous system?
The first is through asking. I do a thorough intake of medical history. I specialize in orthopedics but want to know about the internal environment and how the whole system functions. Because the ultimate goal is one of homeostasis and resiliency (Xu et al., 2018). Patients often think they have to separate orthopedic concerns from internal issues regarding sleep, digestion, elimination, and menstruation. Somatovisceral and visceral-somatic pathways or the way the body affects the organs and the way the organs affect the body are a topic for another essay but know that an informed practitioner is treating the whole person and not just one symptom.
The next way is through palpation or touch. By palpating the channels and cross fiber palpating muscles, I can find areas of excess or deficiency or hyper or hypotonicity in the muscles. One way that stimulating acupuncture points, on a micro level can help to act on a macro level, is by acting as the stimulus in which our body gets stuck anticipating. It can also stimulate a motor point or trigger points, illicit neuromuscular fasciculations, and reset a muscle to its appropriate length. Especially if the muscle is stuck short or long often bracing or in anticipation or inhibited in firing due to pain avoidance (Ellingsen et al., 2018).
#MoreThanJustNeedles At Sláinte we use needles, yes, but every treatment is custom-tailored in real-time to the patient and how they are responding to treatment. I’m trained in multiple styles of acupuncture and various non-needle techniques so I feel confident that each patient can receive the best treatment for them. Everybody is different. It’s my job to meet my patients where they are at but to never discount the environment in which they find themselves. If you have any questions regarding how acupuncture might aid you in regulating your nervous system, don’t hesitate to reach out. I can be reached at www.SlainteAcupuncture.com or info@Slainteacupuncture.com
Sláinte: pronounced SLAHN-chə is Gaelic for health. Derived from the old Irish noun slan which means safe, whole, or health, today it is used as a greeting or a toast.
This is an excerpt from a longer article – Check out the full post and link to references here.