Acupuncture is one of the many therapies used in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) to help overcome illness and injury and to promote health and wellbeing. Acupuncture provides a complimentary or alternative treatment to orthodox medicine as it can help people recover from unexplained, chronic or recurring problems.
Acupuncture can sometimes make sense of illnesses where there is no obvious diagnosis. Looking at health and illness from a traditional Chinese perspective enables me to treat subtle imbalances within your body to help you on the way to recovery. Treatment may not only relieve symptoms, but also enable a sense of relaxation and wellbeing.
Acupuncture is most widely known for use in pain relief but is increasingly being used for other conditions including fertility and health. The World Health Organisation (WHO) provides a list of conditions for which acupuncture is recommended and useful for whilst the British Acupuncture Council provides detailed and up to date Factsheets of the conditions acupuncture has been used for and proven beneficial.
The popularity of acupuncture in the UK has grown over the last 30 years. In 2005 it was estimated there were 2 million private treatments and 1 million NHS treatments a year.
Many doctors are increasingly recognising the validity of acupuncture as one of the most valuable complementary therapies.
In September 2012 the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) recommended acupuncture for migraine and tension headaches, publishing guidelines to GPs suggesting “Consider a course of up to 10 sessions of acupuncture over 5-8 weeks for the prophylactic treatment of chronic tension-type headache.”
In 2009 NICE recommended that acupuncture should be made available to patients as a cost effective short-term treatment for the management of “early, persistent non-specific lower back pain.”
Below are some additional articles about the effectiveness of acupuncture:
Short Sharp Science’, New Scientist, 11 April 2012