Greg BeerlingThe phrase, “If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me how Acupuncture works? Well, I would certainly be a whole dollar wealthier per customer at least.
It’s a common question I have heard over the 30 years of my therapy career, and I don’t hold it against my clients for asking.
My regular answer to this very question is, “Well, that depends on what sort of explanation you want? This may sound like a fairly cryptic answer to many.
Although it is my impression that as my client lies on the therapy table, their mind tries to work out both their personal confidence in the therapy and in me as their practitioner, and when to recognise whether the therapy is beginning to work.
Is the explanation of placing very thin stainless implements into set points and rearranging the flow of energy in channels the right answer? Or is just giving a client a very mechanical, medical explanation equally correct? Both of these types of descriptions may mystify a client as much as saying it’s all divine intervention.
As I outlined previously in my last article, an Acupuncturist has to exist in two worlds of analysis simultaneously, gauging the diagnostic description the client came in with, and the principled diagnostic framework available in the Traditional Chinese Medicine system.
Having both systems allows me to weave both a case history list of signs and symptoms and the narrative to form the story about how their illness or injury features in their lives, how they came to be in the situation they are in, and what familiar scenarios I can use as a metaphor or analogy to describe this to them in an understandable way.
In my pursuit to explain the inner workings of the acupuncture method, it is helpful for me to first assess my client’s current familiarity with common medical terminology and concepts. It helps to be aware of their life experiences and employment background.
Traditional Chinese medicine regularly uses a micro-resembling-the-macro metaphor to both explain the path of the client’s problem and to uncover whether the trouble is of internal or external origin.
Military, social, geographical, material and logistic concepts are used to decipher the puzzle, or more correctly said, “Pattern” impacting the client. This pattern helps to illustrate the likely creation of the trouble and which aspect of the client is broadly responsible.
Discovery of the originating cause of the client’s trouble will be a mixture of external environmental conditions affecting the flow of internal resources and the internal environment affecting the former resources, or most likely a mixture of both, all at the same time and in different places.
Once I’ve determined the most likely pattern of the client, acupuncture point selection is then chosen broadly to assist in decreasing exaggerated symptoms, strengthening weak ones, redirecting ones that are moving in the opposite direction than routine, speeding up ones that are tardy and slowing down ones going too fast.
I’ve avoided using many medical or acupuncture-style words so far, but I plan to use them in the future to avoid getting caught up in the romance of these terms without knowing the place they help fill. Before I branch further down this track, regardless of the language used, it is important not to miss grasping the core of the client’s condition without being confused by the miniscule.
Connect with Greg and book a session today at:
Ph 0733668595
Email info@nrchi.com.au
Sylvia Burns
Kim Lorraine Russell
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