Web Letters from Uchida Acupuncture

One of the most common questions I am asked, probably several times a week, is “How does acupuncture work?” or “What does acupuncture do?” or “Do the needles have medicine on them?” or something along that line. Since a large percentage of my first-time patients have never had acupuncture before, this is a reasonable question.

As I’ve explained to many patients, acupuncture needles are not dipped in any special medicine; no frog saliva or gila monster venom. They are just plain stainless steel. The medicine is YOU. Acupuncture facilitates your body’s ability to heal itself.

There is a very good book written by one of my teachers, Donald Kendall, called The Dao of Chinese Medicine. For more detail than you can possibly digest in one sitting (I know that I can’t), this book will explain all that you may want to know about the physiology of needling therapy. Since I usually have only a couple minutes to answer my patient’s deceptively simple question, I have distilled my explanation into three bullet points:

1) Acupuncture stimulates your spinal cord to release more of your body’s own painkillers, called endorphins, into your bloodstream. This is why acupuncture can have fairly rapid pain killing effects. It is also why people often feel more relaxed or have an increased feeling of well-being after an acupuncture treatment. The pain killing effect of acupuncture will generally last up to 72 hours after a treatment, after which it will wear off as the increased endorphin levels clear your bloodstream. At the beginning of a course of acupuncture therapy, you will often be asked to come for a treatment two to three times a week, especially for pain complaints. This is because early on in the therapy you are primarily benefitting form the analgesic effects of acupuncture, which tends to be temporary.

2) Acupuncture helps to increase blood flow to the injured area. Increased blood flow brings more oxygen and nutrients, which your body needs to heal itself. This is an example where acupuncture facilitates your body’s own capacity to heal, and is responsible for the longer term pain relief that you eventually experience with continued acupuncture care.

3) Acupuncture normalizes your nervous system’s sympathetic/parasympathetic outflow. In plain language, it balances your body’s stress (sympathetic) and relaxation (parasympathetic) response. This is why acupuncture is effective for many internal medicine complaints. Stress is no small deal. It’s not just about being “stressed out”. Even the American Academy of Family Physicians acknowledges that up to 80% of complaints that family practice doctors see every day is stress-related, even chronic and serious conditions like cancer, high cholesterol and hypertension.

I have some patients who have previously experienced acupuncture from another provider, and they ask me, “How come you don’t talk about meridians and qi, or about liver stagnation like my other acupuncturist?” My answer is that I am lazy. Almost 70-80% of my patients are referred to my office by their medical doctors. I take the path of least resistance by explaining acupuncture in physiological terminology so that the patient will go back to the doctor and tell them about endorphin release and increased blood flow and normalizing autonomic nervous system function. They won’t tell the doctor about stagnation in the liver and energy blockages in the meridians. I won’t have to call the incredulous doctor and give them a lesson in Chinese medical terminology. Everyone is happy!

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the meridian explanation of acupuncture as long as I’m talking shop with my acupuncturist colleagues and everyone knows the secret trade language. With my patients and their doctors, however, I am happy communicating in the common medical language that people in this culture are already familiar with.

If you’re back for the second round, I promise it should get mo’ better from here. My first series of postings will cover the most persistent questions many of you, my patients, have asked me over the years. I’ll try to gather a Top Ten list. Right now I can only think of four.

Question #1: “What interested you in becoming an acupuncturist?”

Yeah, I know that’s not grammatically correct, but spoken English rarely is. It’s not the most common question I am asked, but I think that it’s appropriate to begin with. It’s my origins story, so to speak.

I don’t remember the date, but I do remember the exact moment when the lava lamp clicked on behind my eyes, and a life of needling became my destiny. In fact, I remember the exact acupuncture point: Ren 3, or Zhong-Ji in Chinese.

At the time, my wife, Liza, my daughter, Nozomi, and I were living in Hiroshima, Japan. We were missionaries for the United Methodist Church working at the Hiroshima Peace and Human Rights Center. On the day of “the moment”, however, we were in Tokyo visiting at the home of friends whom Liza had previously boarded with some years earlier before we married. This couple, the Shirakawas, were both acupuncturists, and we were at their newly built residence where the clinic was located on the ground floor, and their living quarters upstairs on the 2nd floor.

Liza was getting over a cold that exacerbated her asthma and left her with a persistent cough. She was receiving an acupuncture treatment, something I had never seen before. Mrs. Shirakawa inserted a needle at that fateful point below Liza’s belly button. She said that it was for the stress incontinence that was causing dribbling whenever Liza coughed.

“You have to stimulate the needle so she can feel the qi sensation go down to her backbone”, said Mrs. Shirakawa as she pumped the needle shaft up and down over Liza’s belly. My lava lamp flickered on and started churning slowly. I didn’t know the point’s name, but I never forgot it’s function.

How elegant, I thought, to be able to influence someone’s health with a thin sliver of stainless steel. That was it. The seeds were planted. When the Shirakawa’s heard that I expressed interest in acupuncture, they sent me a box of needles to practice with. We’re not talking about the hair-thin Japanese Seiren needles, “The Painless One”, as its manufacturer likes to advertise. We’re talking thick guage, re-usable Chinese needles that would make a peasant jump. The Shirakawa’s really believed in qi.

Liza had an old Chinese acupuncture book from the 1970s that looked like the prototype for CAM, Chinese Acupuncture and Moxibustion, the required text that every acupuncture student in California becomes intimately acquainted with. At first, I thought that I could study on my own and become an itinerant acupuncturist roaming the Japanese countryside like Zatoichi, the blind swordsman. Liza was cool about being my practice model and suffered greatly for it.

It took another five or six years before I would make my way back to Los Angeles and into a masters program of acupuncture and Oriental medicine at Samra University. I deliberate more than is good for me…or Liza.

Welcome and thank you for showing up for my first web letter. ever. For those of you who are patients or former patients of Uchida Acupuncture, I started this blog mainly thinking of you. When people come in to see me, or any acupuncturist for that matter, you naturally have many questions which you may or may not verbalize during that first office visit. Having been in practice for ten years, I have identified a set of questions that you, collectively, ask me on a weekly, if not daily, basis. I will try to answer those questions here. If you haven’t heard it before, I hope my answers will by informative. If you have, then I hope you will at least be entertained.

My second reason for starting a blog is to document, on a continuing basis, various exercises, activites and nutritional advice I recommend to my patients that I think will be useful in facilitating your healing as you progress with your acupuncture therapy. Oftentimes, at the end of a treatment I will demonstrate a particular exercise for a patient to do at home, and being pressed for time, I am not sure whether my explanation is succinct enough for you to correctly reproduce it at home. Now I will be able to direct you to a particular posting, possibly with pictures and video (let’s hope) that adds more detail to the recommendations I make during the office visit.

My third reason for this blog is for me. Yes, me. After all, if this was just about work, I would eventually find something streaming on Netflix to occupy my evenings instead. There was a time when I savored the task of choosing just the right word to perfectly express my thoughts in print. I’ve wanted to start writing again, but unfortunately my aging brain has probably shrunk several ounces since the last time that prose skipped effortlessly off my fingertips and onto the typewritten page (yes, typewritten! It’s been that long).

With this flagship post, “In the Beginning”, I hope to write one entry per week for the next year, and then look back and see whether it’s all worth doing again. Please feel free to chime in and join the conversation if you feel so inclined, or enraged, by anything I write. I won’t be offended. On the contrary, I’ll be happy that I’m not just talking to myself.