"How often do you, an acupuncturist, receive acupuncture from someone else?"
Results:
These results are based upon 194 responses. As this is a voluntary, non-scientific survey, caution should be used in generalizing the results. Here is a sample of the comments made by those who took the survey and how they voted:
Once or twice a month: It is important to keep up your own pulse readings and monitor your own health. I do this each week, or whenever I believe I am out of balance or "off-color." To this end, I recommend all patients to come in and have their pulses read and balanced every season for preventative care. This is acknowledged TCM practice. If we don't look after ourselves, how can we care for our patients?
More than once a week: When I need treatment, I will commit to a two-to-three times per week treatment schedule for three to six weeks.
Less than once a month: I get a treatment once a season or if I am sick. I get massage once every week or so, and practice tai chi chuan and ba gua. The latter two activities have been key in maintaining and increasing my health. I treat myself with herbs as necessary. I do my best to be as strong, vital and stagnation-free as I can. My patients seem to get better faster when I am.
The most important relationship I seek to nurture in the treatment room is the one a patient has with their own body. We live in a culture that teaches us to override pain, defer to outside authority, and push through discomfort. Patients often arrive hoping I can “fix” them, but the truth is, we can’t do the work for them. We can offer guidance, insight and support, but healing requires their full participation.
In the U.S alone, approximately one in nine adults (11.1%) report experiencing subjective cognitive decline. A comparable percentage will go on to develop Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia. As researchers and clinicians seek integrative solutions outside of conventional pharmacological approaches, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) emerges as a promising, multimodal strategy in the prevention and treatment of cognitive decline.
When we are in the grips of an anxious pattern, it dominates our brain and nervous system, and we lose our normal body-mind regulation. In this and subsequent articles, I present effective mindfulness-based method* via case study, that we can add to our acupuncture treatments to help clients consciously stop the dysregulating cascade of events and bring “distressed parts” into coherent body-mind-spirit integration.
