In Chinese Medicine theory, our Qi is responsible for keeping us balanced, and ensuring everything flows smoothly. This energy, that is said to move along acupuncture meridians, can become sluggish or even stuck leading to physical and emotional imbalances and manifesting as physical and emotional problems.

This happens because of external factors such as trauma, injury, illness and even our body’s reaction to things like cold weather.

As well as this, aspects of our lifestyle can affect the flow of Qi, for example diet, how hard we work and how much time we have to take care of ourselves.

Instead of suppressing symptoms, we work on your whole body and how that Qi flows, enabling you to not only feel improvement of the symptoms you came with but to feel better in yourself.  This is done by finding out what the underlying causes contributing to the issue are.

For example, if you can’t sleep, taking a sleeping pill will make you fall asleep but the imbalance you have which prevents you dropping off will still be there. If you have a stiff jaw, muscle relaxants may help alleviate that, but the reason you are clenching your jaw hasn’t gone away.   

Chinese medicine aims to address the root causes of your issue, rather than just suppressing the symptoms. These will be different for everybody, which is why such an individualised holistic approach is so beneficial.

From a more conventional medical perspective, the insertion of acupuncture needles was demonstrated to have the following benefits during clinical studies:

It can promote pain relief through the release of endorphins and neurohumoral factors, which change the way pain is processed in the central and peripheral nervous system (Zhao 2008). As well as this it has been found to increase release of serotonin and noradrenaline, again reducing pain experience (Wang 2005)

It acts on the ‘analytical’ part of the brain which triggers anxiety and worry, reducing the impact on us (Hui 2010)

Inflammation was demonstrated to be reduced by Kim 2(003), Kavoussi (2007) and Zijlstra (2003), via the promotion of immunomodulatory factors.

Improvement in muscle stiffness joint mobility and swelling can be experienced- achieved by the increase of local microcirculation (Komori 2009), and inhibition of cytokines (which mediate inflammation) including Interleukin 1 and 6, and tumour necrosing factor – alpha (Xu 2009, Wu 2010).

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