Acupuncture 

'It matters not whether medicine is old or new, so long as it brings about a cure. 

It matters not whether theories are Eastern or Western, so long as they prove to be true' Jen-Hsou Lin 

Acupuncture dates back to the traditional Chinese medice (TCM) of 4000 years ago which describes patterns of disease in the way they affect all the body systems. This concept is becoming validated in the conventional medicine of today, as the ways in which all the body systems inter-relate is more appreciated. In turn, this awareness encourages us to view our animal patients as a totality and not just as an assembly of many separate functioning parts. 

 

TCM theory describes disease as being a state of imbalance between two opposing poles, denotes as Ying and Yang. The art of acupuncture is to particularise the imbalance accurately so that it can be corrected quite specifically. The treatment is effected with the use of very fine sterile needles at the appropriate acupuncture points. During their time of insertion the needles may be gently rotated or agitated by hand - a procedure which the vast majority of patients seem to tolerate very happily while conscious. Some even find the experience quite soporific and take the chance to have 'forty winks'! 

 

Acupuncture points lie on a system of conduits or channels that carry and distribute vital energy. Each organ is represented by a channel, and disease of a particular organ can be treated by using the acupuncture points on the channel that represents the organ. 

Use of specific acupunture points corrects the flow of 'life energy' (Qi) in the channel and this in turn has an effect on the diseased internal organ. The overall result is to correct the imbalance within the body and thus to heal the disease. 

 

Acupuncture has the potential to be used in many different complaints and is found to be particularly useful in: 

Numbers of treatment sessions required tend to vary between one and five, the intervals between governed by the duration of response to the previous treatment. It is however, possible to assess the quality of response likely to be achieved 3 - 7 days after the first use of the needles. 

 

Please do not hesitate to call the surgery if you require any further information.