Medical Acupuncture Article

How Long Do Acupuncture Treatments Take?

Acupuncture today has been accepted into the mainstream of medicine. Most medical professionals from the mainstream don’t hesitate to recommend an acupuncture line of treatment for certain ailments like stress, pain and certain emotional problems. The great thing is that acupuncture has no side effects which regular medicine very often has so besides being recommended by a doctor, individuals today are exercising their choice and going to acupuncture clinics in order to get cured.

How long does acupuncture treatment last? This could vary greatly not only regarding the disease and the severity but also the patient. Some tend to be more responsive to the treatment than others and some respond quicker than others. It also depends on certain symptoms, how old or active the patient is, how long he has suffered from the condition, etc. There are some patients who are very easy to cure because they respond so well and so fast. For them, maybe a visit or two would do. This is observed very often with children who are naturally responsive. For adults, the duration for a responsive patient could be anything from one visit to maybe six for one or maybe more symptoms. Sometimes, a patient might need to go twenty times before a cure or relief is effected. In certain cases like paralysis, there might need to be many sessions before any sign of improvement is observed.

There could be times when the patient might have to go in every day for a session. This is usually recommended when there is pain and the treatment continues till the pain stops. Regular sessions could also be needed for problems like drug addiction in order to keep the cravings down. What does happen with acupuncture at times is a slight aggravation of the symptoms in the beginning, but this subsides and settles down. Of course, if you are one of the lucky few, you will probably feel well and absolutely fit immediately. But there have been cases when improvement has been followed by an aggravation of symptoms in the following sessions. Always remember to ensure that the acupuncture practitioner knows about this as he might want to change his line of treatment if this happens.

Whenever you have any ailment, do look at treatment by acupuncture as one of the options too. This is because your ailment might just get very much better with acupuncture so you should consider it. The ailments that respond particularly well are: cramps – all kinds whether muscular, stomach or menstrual, headaches or congestion in the head, tiredness, children’s nervousness, depression, pain and hemorrhoids. To a lesser degree, you will find that acupuncture is useful in other conditions too like eczema, palpitations of the heart, diarrhea, shingles, gall bladder problems, menstruation when it is painful, gastric problems and autonomic nervous problems when they come on after surgery.

Acupuncture can also be resorted to in many other ailments. Very often, one finds that when traditional treatment fails, acupuncture presents a ray of hope, with relief even if it does not completely cure. The view today is that it might not be very effective when it comes to curing serious illnesses like infantile paralysis, tuberculosis or Parkinson’s disease. What it has proved very helpful for is to alleviate the symptoms of most diseases.

There have been cases where the success rate has been excellent, especially when it comes to pain relief. Take the case of a lady whose ankle was painful and no medicine gave her relief. Three treatments with acupuncture and she was cured. The acupuncturist took careful note of her problem and the treatment was prescribed. Yet another case involved a man with low grade fever that kept persisting at 100°F and it would come on every night. He suffered for many months and traditional medicines just couldn’t cure him. With acupuncture, at first, the regular treatments were tried with no effect. Then the acupuncturist started giving him what was called optimal treatment which meant that it was done very early in the morning. That was the end of the fever attacks for the man. So acupuncture basically offers hope for cure without side effects.