If you have been diagnosed with, or have been suffering from:

  • Generalized Anxiety Disorder
  • Panic Attacks
  • PTSD
  • Stress
  • Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) 
  • A chronic disease that gives you anxiety

You are not alone.  Anxiety disorders affect about 40 million American adults (about 18%).

There are many types of pills, capsules, counseling options and therapies being sold as a treatment for anxiety.  What Chinese medicine offers is nothing less than something completely different.  Your acupuncturist seeks the root of your disorder, will help redefine your anxiety, tapping into the essence of who you are, what your purpose is, and how you are seeking it.

Sound like a monumental task?  It is not easy, or else these “silver bullet” treatments would be a lot more effective.  Anyone looking for a magic bullet need look elsewhere.  Our relationship will be one of trainer and trainee, student and teacher, physician and patient.  Finding peace from anxiety requires re-training of your body’s innate communication system, educating the conscious mind, and developing a lifestyle that supports you.

The heart governs the emotional body.  When any of the other organs are out of sorts, the heart responds by sending a signal to our consciousness that something is amiss.  That signal transmitted by the heart is what most of us term ANXIETY. The important piece to take away from this is that anxiety is only a signal of a deeper imbalance.  Blocking the signal is like “killing the messenger.”  The result is that you will get another signal in time, one that is deeper, louder, and probably more physically related so that it is harder to ignore.  Acupuncture and its related experience will help you find out where the signal is originating from, and support you in clearing imbalance at the root.

Emotions can damage the body and cause specific symptoms over time or when experienced beyond our capacity to cope for even a short time.  On the other hand, the part of us that governs each emotion also contains an important part of our character that, when balanced, benefits us greatly.  Health is the ability to feel emotions to counter insult to our emotional system, then to turn it into a virtue by right thinking and action.  These are listed in the image above

RESEARCH:

From a 2007 review of 12 studies, acupuncture was found to benefit anxiety disorders, though the number of subjects in each was limited.

Acupunct Med. 2007 Jun;25(1-2):1-10. 17641561

About this article:

This article was re-posted by Dr. Josh Eha, DAOM, L.Ac, C.SMA from his blog on Midwest Specialty Acupuncture, during his time as an educator on TrailheadHealth.com. We thank him for his participation and expertize.