Acupuncture for Anxiety: A natural remedy
Who hasn’t experienced anxiety at some point in their lives? Your chest tightens, breathing gets shallow, stomach gets tight, maybe you start to perspire, your knees get week. That is likely a more extreme case of anxiety but for many the symptoms are more subtle, so much so that people don’t realize they live in a frequent state of low level anxiety. This leads to continuous stress on the body which over time weakens body in general, particularly the immune system. But that is a topic for another blog to two. The common treatment for anxiety are medications and possibly psychotherapy, which are both helpful but often only to a point.
In allopathic medicine, anxiety is typically seen as a psychological disorder but that is not necessarily true. In Chinese medicine, the diagnosis for anxiety can and is often caused by imbalances in the body and the Shen (spirit or mind) that vary from person to person. Therefore, treatment with psychotropic drugs, only addresses the mental aspects but even these are not clearly understood. With drugs, the symptoms of anxiety are masked but the source of the problem is never dealt with. Psychotherapy tries to address some of the other issues but neither drugs or psychotherapy address the root cause, the specific person’s imbalance. Which is where acupuncture comes in.
Don’t wait for your doctor to come around to the idea. Take your recovery into your own hands. Evidence shows that acupuncture helps alleviate anxiety alone or in conjunction with allopathic forms of treatment. In a comprehensive literature review appearing in a recent edition of CNS Neuroscience and Therapeutics, it was proved that acupuncture is comparable to cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), which psychologists commonly use to treat anxiety (Errington-Evans, 2011). In the American Journal of Chinese Medicine, a very favorable study was reviewed on the positive effects of acupuncture to reduce anxiety and improve the immune system (Lorena Arranz et al,, 2007), Another study published in the Journal of Endocrinology in March 2013 discovered stress hormones were lower in rats after receiving electric acupuncture (Eshkevari, Permaul and Mulroney, 2013).
