Acupuncture helps your body regulate itself. Traditional Chinese Medicine is a medical system that is designed so that practitioners like me can use personalized treatments to stimulate your body in such a way that it recognizes where there is an imbalance. Once signaled, your body can make the necessary changes to bring you back to balance.

In Western terms, this balance is called homeostasis. For example, when you eat sugar, your body produces insulin to move that sugar from your bloodstream into the cells where it can provide an energy source. When your blood sugars are too low, your body knows to produce glucagon to move sugars out of storage in your liver to the bloodstream. You don’t have to remember to do any of this. You don’t have to think about it at all. Your body recognizes the signals and acts appropriately. Until something throws things off.

Using specific acupuncture points (and/or herbs, food, lifestyle changes, etc.), my job is to send signals to the body to pay attention to the imbalances. With pain or injuries, we know that acupuncture needles increase local blood flow to the area where they are inserted. The needles create microtears (though not painful!) and flag a body response of repair. It’s like a road inspector going around and circling with orange paint the potholes, cracks, and other areas that need to be patched, filled, and otherwise tended to.

Is Acupuncture Magic?

Yes, of course it is! Okay, maybe not. But acupuncture can seem somewhat magical because the same points can be used for a multitude of issues, even health conditions that require opposite responses. For example, I recently watched a short video by Matthew Bauer, an acupuncturist in practice in California since 1986, and he gave the following studies as an example of the power of acupuncture.

For more than twenty years, researchers at the University of California School of Medicine, originally lead by Cardiologist John Longhurst, have been doing studies on acupuncture to affect blood pressure. They started by studying the effect of acupuncture to lower blood pressure in animals with high blood pressure (hypertension), and they discovered specific acupuncture points that did just that. They confirmed through treating those same points on humans that the response is the same. After eight weekly sessions of acupuncture, they were able to lower the blood pressure during and beyond the treatment time.

What’s interesting is that they then tested these same acupuncture points on animals and humans with low blood pressure (hypotension). In these subjects, those same points did the reverse and raised the blood pressure. And it did so by basically the same mechanism. Stimulating these acupuncture points sent a signal to the parasympathetic nervous system to the brain stem to the limbic system. And there, the brain directed the body to create chemical responses that either raised or lowered the blood pressure, as was appropriate and needed.

This is fascinating! Because if you are hypertensive, you are specifically given medications to lower your blood pressure. But sometimes this can cause your blood pressure to go too low. So, then you have to talk to your doctor about decreasing your medication. And some people, especially older individuals, have high blood pressure in general, but their blood pressure drops quickly when they go from sitting to standing, causing them to risk falling. This is called orthostatic hypertension.

But with acupuncture, including these acupuncture points and a more personalized treatment that is likely to include other points and recommendations, it doesn’t really matter if your blood pressure is high or low.

Just as it did in over 48 experiments done by this team, acupuncture helps the brain to see which action needed to be taken. In other words, acupuncture helped bring the body back to balance. This is what I regularly tell people. But now you can understand that I’m not being mystical or woowoo when we say this.

Does Acupuncture Stimulating Homeostasis Only Work for Blood Pressure?

Absolutely not. There are many situations where we want a “Goldilocks” response from the body. If you read my last blog post, you’ll know that the word for not too much and not too little is “lagum.” Blood pressure and blood sugars are just two examples where lagum is needed.

Immunomodulation is the ability of the body to amp up in response to a virus, bacteria, or other pathogen, while settling down an overreactive immune system in the case of allergies and autoimmune disorders. Muscles need to know when to contract and when to relax. You certainly know you don’t want either diarrhea or constipation. You want to be able to sleep when it’s time, but feel energized other times. Everything in the body is about the right response at the right time.

Acupuncture helps your body know when, by how much, and with what to respond. It stimulates your own healing reaction. Isn’t that amazing?!