Cleveland, Ohio-based University Hospitals features an integrative health network that is utilizing acupuncture, among other therapies, to help patients presenting with symptoms of long COVID: brain fog, fatigue, headaches, dizziness and/or shortness of breath even months after infection.
In an article from a local news outlet reporting on UH Connor Whole Health's use of acupuncture to treat long-haul symptoms of COVID, acupuncturist Christine Kaiser, clinical manager for acupuncture and quality at UH Connor, stated:
"A lot of my COVID long haul patients are coming in, saying they feel shortness of breath, but also fatigue, body aches, headaches, insomnia, anxiety, these are things that we often treat with acupuncture. And luckily, as we've been applying acupuncture to the long haul cases we've been seeing a good response from patients."
UH Connor Whole Health has five locations in the Cleveland area, offering acupuncture and a wide range of other integrative services including chiropractic, massage, meditation, mindfulness, music therapy, guided imagery, yoga and stress management. (To learn more, click here.)
If you're wondering whether acupuncture is being provided by medical doctors or other health care professionals, rather than licensed members of the AOM profession, the UH website clearly states the following:
"Our acupuncturists are all licensed and highly trained, and work collaboratively with a patient's primary care physician or specialists to ensure they are getting appropriate care for their condition, both through Traditional Chinese Medicine and [W]estern medicine practices. This holistic approach to health and wellness is one of the hallmarks of our integrative medicine program."
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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