Sooner or later, you probably will encounter a patient who experiences anxiety related to their acupuncture treatment. You may already have encountered a patient like this. Perhaps the patient never returned due to fear or increased stress. However, an acupuncturist's primary tool (the needle) may not be the main reason that patients scurry away. Sometimes, it might have to do with the approach. A gentle approach to acupuncture treatment can significantly reduce a patient's anxiety, and incorporating massage therapy into your practice can help.
We must respect our patients' anxiety. If a patient believes their treatment experience was too harsh, they probably will not return, regardless of whether the overall impact was positive or negative. When we, as clinicians, are met with resistance, it's important to let the patient lead the way. A patient may use words such as "jitters," "apprehension" or "stress" to describe their current emotional state. These yellow flags may be your key to adjust gears before you have to go into reverse.
Physical symptoms of anxiety include twitching, muscle tension, sweating, dry mouth, difficulty swallowing and abdominal pain (which also may be the only symptom of stress, especially in children). In the treatment room, we may identify other symptoms that accompany anxiety. They include, but are not limited to: dizziness, rapid breathing, and rapid or irregular heart rate.
The approach I am outlining to help decrease anxiety includes a brief massage that is easy for anyone to perform. One does not have to be trained in massage and bodywork to significantly reduce a patient's anxiety before continuing a successful acupuncture treatment plan. An anxiety-reducing massage takes fewer than five minutes to complete. The focus, especially for an acupuncturist not a trained massage therapist, consists of a gentle soothing touch rather than a specific massage technique.
Massage is known to reduce cortisol levels. Therefore, it eliminates stress and anxiety. If, as an acupuncturist, you find the application of massage is too time-consuming, a constructive alternative is to add a trained massage and bodywork professional to your practice.
Chronic pain afflicts over 20% of the adult population. Sadly, most MDs have essentially no education in treating pain, beyond offering a few toxic medications. Then they tend to steer people with pain away from those health practitioners who are trained. This puts the acupuncture community on the front lines for addressing this epidemic.
When the body is going through a stressful event, the sympathetic system is activated. This activation will help the body with a life-threatening situation. If this state is activated for prolonged periods of time, it starts to consume energy. These traumatic events that generate stressors in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) will eventually become internalized.
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One of the things that makes acupuncture so difficult to measure is that the medicine actually does contain some esoteric aspects. There have been numerous studies that demonstrate the neurochemical reasoning behind why acupuncture points stimulate the autonomic nervous system to enact change However, not all the benefits of TCM can easily be measured by randomized, controlled trials. But does that make them fundamentally and definitively untrue?
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