Acupuncture and Fibromyalgia



When you spend some time doing research on the difference between the treatment of illness by conventional Western medicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine with acupuncture, you come across a lot of conditions like fibromyalgia that make you really stop and think. The use of a word like fibromyalgia has the tendency to make us feel rather safe as well as nervous when it is applied to us. It implies that there is some mystical type of disease and we are thankful that the masters of medicine have isolated it and can help rid us of it.

Then, we find out it is actually just a big word that means we have pain in our bodies and doctors have no idea what causes it. Fibromyalgia can better be called a syndrome that is characterized by pain the muscles and fatigue. It is very common in women between the ages of 34 and 56. The bottom line is that doctors have no idea what causes it and so they are only able to attempt to relieve the pain a bit and aid sleep. The problem is that the medications used to relieve pain and aid sleep are sometimes worst than the pain in the muscles to the overall wellness of the patient.

Acupuncture for fibromyalgia is based on an understanding of the causation of the syndrome. Traditional Chinese Medicine is going to see pain and fatigue as the natural result of a problem with the flow of vital energy, or qi, throughout the body. This vital energy is associated with various organ systems and travels through the body in a system of channels known as Meridians. When something happens to disrupt this normal flow, illness occurs. The treatments are based on discovering where the problem lies and correcting it by inserting needles into a combination of somewhere in the neighborhood of 2000 acupuncture points located throughout the body.

The needles regulate the flow of qi. The flow may be excessive or it may be blocked. Although blockages usually are associated with pain, it will take a complete evaluation of the patient by the practitioner to make a diagnosis. The actual procedure is almost painless. Some people report feeling a slight prick when the needle is inserted. Others report nothing except a calming and sometimes a surge of energy. There are rarely any side effects, and even then they would be only slight bleeding and sometimes bruising.

Acupuncture works for the relief of fibromyalgia. That is fairly certain. More importantly, the fact that it does work so well points out the difference between Western Medicine and what has been called, sometimes with derision, an alternative medical theory such as acupuncture in the treatment of certain conditions. The doctor treats fibromyalgia but throwing chemicals at it that may do more harm than the pain itself. The acupuncturist gets to the source of the problem and fixes that. He fully expects that once health is restored, the symptoms will go away also.