What are Autoimmune Disorders and How Can Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture Help?
In the West, much of the population seeks care after experiencing uncomfortable signs and symptoms leading to further clinical testing. When resources are exhausted, somehow, a discovery is made for how acupuncture could help to reduce pain with hopes of restoration back to balance. Many still are not aware of what autoimmune disorders are and how they affect the body. Autoimmune diseases occur when the body’s immune system begins to attack itself damaging healthy tissues. When the body should be warding off viruses, harmful bacteria and toxins, it is in a state of hyper immune response where pathogens may not be present at all. The immune system begins to affect parts of the body specific to individuals such as the skin, joints, muscles, blood vessels, digestive system, endocrine system, and nervous system. This hyper immune response creates musculoskeletal pain, neurological issues, loss of balance, disorientation, fatigue and loss of general well-being.
How Chinese Medicine Can Help Treat Autoimmune Disorders
Chinese medicine employs a natural approach to treating the body as a whole with a focus on patterns. Assessing the tongue and pulse, organ relationships along with any imbalances, reflect disharmonies including compromised functions of specific organs as well as entire body processes. The emphasis of treatment is to fortify those organs by eliminating toxins, accumulation of substances such as dampness and phlegm, internal heat, otherwise known as inflammation, and to strengthen the immune system. Much of the time, imbalances cause stagnation of fluids with blood being a common focus. Blood stasis causes pain and organ dysfunction. By simply moving bioelectrical energy known in Chinese medicine as “Qi” and blood, many signs and symptoms that pertain to autoimmune disorders subside allowing the body to return to homeostasis.
How Acupuncture Can Help Treat Autoimmune Disorders
There is much speculation about whether or not acupuncture can help treat autoimmune disorders. Chinese medicine theory explains processes in terms of energetics. Nowadays, semantics and cultural perspectives have led to extensive global clinical testing. It is public knowledge that acupuncture points connect to channels in the body as well as actual nerve endings that innervate on the surface of the body and deep into the organs. Fascial material, known as “Luo” in Chinese medicine, is the outer network of fibrous material that holds bioelectrical energy, “Qi”. Highly trained acupuncturists assess the body’s overall condition by observation and assessment of channels and acupuncture points. The autonomic nervous system, composed of sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, regulate body processes and much of the time, disharmonies within these systems are the root pathological causes that lead to autoimmune disorders. Acupuncturists work to balance these systems to bring the body into parasympathetic responses allowing the body to heal itself. When the body isn’t fighting itself and can rest, its immune system can regenerate and proliferate a healing response.
Evidence of Acupuncture For Treating Autoimmune Disorders
Acupuncture, a modality of Chinese medicine that has been practiced well over 3000 years, has reached a pinnacle of clinical trials with efforts to provide explanations as to how it works and why. Autonomic regulation is an area of focus for studies. As stated in the study, “Acupuncture Effect and Central Autonomic Regulation”, “Emerging evidence indicates that acupuncture treatment not only activates distinct brain regions in different kinds of diseases caused by imbalance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic activities, but also modulates adaptive neurotransmitter in related brain regions to alleviate autonomic response.” Acupuncture works to engage chemical processes within the body by reducing and/or increasing them in order to create balance of the autonomic nervous system. This balance is how the body heals itself.
Reference:
Acupuncture effect and central autonomic regulation. (2013, May 26). PubMed. Retrieved May 26, 2013, from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3677642/
By Dr. Don Walker, DAcCHM, LAc.