Acupuncture Offers Important Benefits No Matter What Your Age
While many people assume that acupuncture is only appropriate for adults, this healing practice is just as helpful for children and teenagers. Acupuncture offers a safe, effective way to manage pain, injuries, and chronic conditions throughout your entire life.
How Acupuncture Can Help You
Illnesses and pain can be related to imbalances in your body. The imbalances occur when Qi, a life force that flows through your body in a system of meridians, becomes blocked. Acupuncture clears the blockages, restoring your body's natural balance.
When you visit an acupuncturist, it's much easier to:
- Keep Pain Under Control. Acupuncture eases pain by decreasing inflammation and prompting your body to release endorphins. Endorphins are hormones that relieve pain naturally and also improve your mood. The treatment relieves both short-term and chronic pain without any side effects or worries about drug addiction. It's often used to treat back, neck, and knee pain and also helps both adults and children cope with pain due to surgeries or injuries.
- Manage Chronic Conditions. Acupuncture helps you control your symptoms and avoid the flareups that occur with many chronic conditions. It's a good choice if you have osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, allergies, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), menstrual cramps, gastric ulcers, sciatica, sickle cell disease, carpal tunnel syndrome, eczema, high blood pressure, infertility, anxiety, depression, and other conditions.
- Prevent Headaches. Pain from tension headaches, migraines, and cluster headaches make it hard to get through the day. Acupuncture relieves headache pain by reducing inflammation, releasing endorphins and altering blood flow to the head. In addition to easing your pain, acupuncture could also reduce the number of headaches you get every month.
- Treat Infections. Do you still feel unwell despite undergoing conventional treatment for a sinus infection, ear infection, pneumonia, bronchitis or another type of infection? Acupuncture treatments decrease inflammation, improves the function of your immune system, and helps you heal.
- Eases Stress. Stress doesn't care about your age. Although childhood should be a carefree time, many kids suffer from stress, anxiety, and excessive worry, just like adults. If you or your children struggle to manage stress, acupuncture may offer the ideal solution. Serotonin and endorphins released during acupuncture treatments improve your mood and help you relax. Acupuncture sessions also lower your level of cortisol, a key stress hormone.
- Quit Smoking. Quitting smoking may be one of the hardest things you'll ever do. Acupuncture can help curb your cravings. Research study subjects who received auricular (ear) acupuncture smoked 14 fewer cigarettes per day compared to 7 fewer cigarettes for those in the control group in one research study. The study results appeared in Preventive Medicine.
- Relieve Indigestion. Acupuncture also improves gastrointestinal symptoms in kids and adults. Whether the problem is indigestion, heartburn, or gastroesophageal reflux disorder (GERD), acupuncture eases your discomfort. Treatments lower stomach acid production, increase blood flow to the digestive system, prevent yeast overgrowth, and reduce inflammation and bloating. Eighty-three percent of research study participants saw an improvement in their digestive symptoms after four weeks of acupuncture treatments, according to research published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
- Calm Your Colicky Baby. Acupuncture eases colic, a condition that occurs when otherwise healthy babies cry for long periods of time. Colic starts when a baby is just a few weeks old and can last for several months. Crying decreased significantly in infants who received acupuncture treatments twice a week for two weeks, according to the research study published in Acupuncture in Medicine.
- Sleep Better. Acupuncture helps your body produce more melatonin, a hormone that helps control the sleep-wake cycle, in addition to increasing the production of calming hormones.
Ready to try acupuncture? Give us a call and we'll arrange a convenient appointment.
Sources:
Acupuncture in Medicine: Acupuncture Reduces Crying in Infants with Infantile Colic, 12/1/10
Annals of Internal Medicine: Effect of Acupuncture for Postprandial Distress Syndrome, 5/12/20