Traditional Acupuncture enters the 21st Century with New Scientifiic Research

Traditional Acupuncture enters the 21st Century with New Scientifiic Research

Five years ago, my blood pressure problem became really stubborn and unmanageable. I reacted by doing everything right - I stuck to a low-fat and low sodium diet, I ran a mile daily, and I took my hypertension medication right on the dot every day. It didn't really do me any good; when my blood pressure remained high for a long time, my doctor recommended trying adding two more kinds of medication to my prescription. That's when I decided to opt out, and should go alternative. I had always wondered about traditional acupuncture and how it was a lot of help with stubborn health problems that seem to come on for no reason. So I made my appointment with a highly-recommended traditional acupuncture therapist.

Each acupuncture session lasted no more than a half hour; and it brought my pressure down by 40 points. I was on top of the world. Not only was acupuncture working for me, this was side-effect free alternative therapy - it was doing so in a way my health insurance plan actually paid for. Most regular doctors don't look to acupuncture for anything other than a desperate last ditch attempt, to be tried only when all other plans fail. But this is beginning to change. Acupuncture is just about the best that alternative medicine has to offer; and doctors are beginning to accept this more and more each passing year.The acceptance doesn't come for no reason though. There have been many scientific studies done on it now, and they've found effective treatments here for just about every troublesome problem you may have that conventional medicine has been no help with.

More mainstream hospitals today offer traditional acupuncture than ever before - the number has actually doubled over the past five years. Even Harvard Medical School offers acupuncture on its medical courses. Doctors want nothing more than to learn acupuncture now; and once they do, will refer a patient for acupuncture therapy much more quickly than they ever did before. If you are one of those people who just don't trust the pharmaceutical industry anymore, acupuncture could be your best bet. Since acupuncture is kind of still on the periphery, it happens to cost a lot less than traditional drug therapy. A visit to a doctor could cost you $200; a visitor acupuncturist in city back perhaps $50. Employers everywhere love this.

Still, acupuncture is not without its problems. Skeptics are always trying to see if it's been tested deeply enough. But according to the National Institutes of Health, acupuncture is about the first alternative therapy that's been really studied to modern scientific standards. Perhaps their skepticism comes from the way earlier research into acupuncture was done 30 years ago; the methods they had back then wasn't as conclusive as modern research. For instance, all medical research has always included testing against placebos. When your treatment uses no medicines as such and depends on needles and inner enegies though, how do you design an effective placebo? And acupuncture doesn't always work well alone. When you wish to treat for problems like drug addiction, it works best in conjunction with Western medicine.

But for all kinds of pain-related conditions, or for conditions like the nausea that comes from having been in surgery, traditional acupuncture works wonderfully. Traditional acupuncture is going high-tech now though. They have electroacupuncture machines that do the trick with low degrees of electric shocking. This actually is quite encouraging. There is actual current research into this science to help bring it into the 21st century. When traditional knowledge alone helps as much as it does, there is no telling what it can do once real progress is made with new research. Acupuncture does its magic by stimulating nerve junctions around the body to affect how the central nervous system regulates blood circulation and pain mechanisms. The more, conventional doctors learn to see acupuncture as a great form of complementary medicine, the more quickly we will progress in finding new and effective ways of treating stubborn millennia-old health problems.