Can Acupuncture Help with Anxiety?
Oh my goodness, acupuncture is an amazing treatment for anxiety. As a naturopathic doctor and an acupuncturist, I love utilizing Eastern and Western medicine to support people living with anxiety.
How Acupuncture Helps With Anxiety
Anxiety (or “running piglet syndrome” as it’s called when translated from Chinese) has a long history of benefitting from Acupuncture and Chinese herbs. Anxiety in Chinese medicine is not simply a “one size fits all” diagnosis, as it is in Western Medicine. See, in Western medicine a person with anxiety is seen as having one type of physiological imbalance and is offered a narrow range of 1-3 treatments, all anti-anxiety medications (and if those don’t work, anti-depressants come next).
In Chinese medicine, the practitioner will take a thorough history of your experience with anxiety and ask a lot of questions about you and your life. A pulse is taken along with a reading of your tongue and with all of that information the practitioner will develop a diagnosis and a therapeutic strategy aligned with what’s going on inside of you specifically. There are several nuances to address here that involve balancing your body’s qi, nourishing a deficiency of yin (your anti-aging and stabilizing substance) or yang (your heat, fire, passion, energy), and correcting imbalances that cause organs or our spiritual energy to over-act or under-act.
When I help people struggling with anxiety, I use acupuncture to help reset the nervous system; in fact, I often tell my patients that the acupuncture needles are like hitting the “reset” button on your body’s nervous system, especially your autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system or ANS is an ancient part of our nervous system that houses and controls the balance between our fight-or-flight, or sympathetic, response and our rest-and-digest, or parasympathetic, response. So in addition to addressing imbalances uncovered through Chinese medical diagnosis, we are also using the needles to directly stimulate, regulate, and calm an overactive nervous system. This is why I LOVE what I do, because my toolkit is so wide that it really enables me to create a treatment strategy uniquely tailored to your specific mental, emotional and physical needs!
How Can Functional Medicine Help With Anxiety?
In addition to practicing acupuncture, I’m also a trained functional medicine practitioner. As a doctor I understand that there can be some basic physiological shifts that occur that put or keep a person in a state of anxiety. When I work with patients virtually to address anxiety we dive deep to create a comprehensive picture of what is going on that includes:
Assessing digestive health
Rebalancing hormones
Optimizing sleep and stress levels
Creating a comprehensive + long term plan based on a person’s “software” or genetic predispositions
To discover how I help people living with anxiety you can schedule an acupuncture session in Prescott AZ with Dr. Emilie Wilson here. If you would like to learn more about how I use Functional Medicine to build out a comprehensive healing plan inside my signature 6 month program, please schedule a free Discovery Call with me here.