Needle point

Acupuncture has been used to cure many ailments and conditions for thousands of years. LUCY JOHNSTON braves a few needles to find out how it works.

"Breathe in," Rachel Maguire tells me as she jabs me for the fourth time with a disposable fine needle.

I have made an appointment to see Rachel at the acupuncture clinic to receive treatment. There is nothing specifically wrong with me yet I find the concept of a former intensive care nurse having spent four years training full time as an acupuncturist quite intriguing.

Rachel now knows more about me than my mother does.

She has taken a comprehensive medical history, noting everything from childhood earaches to shocks and traumas, my love of chocolate to how often I wake each night and thematic dreams.

Not only have we discussed my lengthy list of complaints but also my family's medical history and what medication I take.

For Rachel it is vital to have every ounce of information she can possibly extract about a patient as the treatment for an ailment such as migraine in one person may be different to the treatment another migraine sufferer requires.

After this lengthy discussion I hop up on the bed and Rachel feels my pulses, commenting that they are weak.

Concerned, I probe further and she tells me I am deficient in fire energy.

At this point the my cynical journalistic mindset kicks in and I start to think this diagnosis sounds a little like the days my horoscope tells me I may meet a stranger who may turn out to be a useful future contact.

However, Rachel goes on to explain to me that terms such as water, earth and fire simply represent various organs which feed and nourish each other. Wanting to boost my fire energy, Rachel must interpret my pulses to be able to know the precise location for each needle.

She says there are many uses for each point but of greatest importance is the combination of points, and the time of day they are used. Apparently what season you use the specific points in can also impact their power.

After a recent car accident in which I hurt my foot Rachel says she can feel a deficiency in my earth energy.

Often the body holds on to shock, Rachel says.

"I've treated hundreds of people. Each person has quite specific energies, your fire energy was weak which for the time of year is not unusual."

Rachel also thinks she could work on my chocolate addiction and suggests a needle in my ear.

"Ear acupuncture is a science in itself. It is very good with addictions, including drug addictions.

"You can use the ear because if you look at the ear upside down it's a bit like a foetus, the backbone is the bottom, all the points are worked out like that, where the baby's eyes or ears would be. It's a good adjunct to the other treatments."

About 20 minutes later Rachel declares my pulses to be much healthier and removes the needles. I feel tired, which is apparently not an unusual reaction to treatment.

"It can clear out the dampness, make people feel a lot clearer in the head.

"If a stagnant pond gets icky and a good rain comes and flushes it through it clears."

She says I really need another treatment to help push this one through.

Rachel first became interested in acupuncture after she returned from working in Africa as a medic with a diving expedition.

For six months Rachel learnt to dive and thought she might fancy being a diving instructor.

To fund this she went back to England where she had a chance meeting with a woman who had studied at the International College of Oriental Medicine in East Grinstead in the UK.

"I just thought everything she said made sense. I was an intensive care nurse, looking after heart operations and transplant patients and I got a bit burnt out.

"I was looking for a change."

Rachel and her new acquaintance talked at length about acupuncture and everything the lady said to her Rachel says she has found to be true.

"It can be incredibly powerful. You can use it to treat very difficult things, things people struggle with and are at the end of their tether with like MS and ME.

"I also had treatments myself and noticed a big difference. I've never thought once `I'm not sure about this'.

"What's great is it's just using your own energy. It's balancing and stimulates your body to heal itself. Sometimes people experience a clearing, other people feel incredibly energised.

"Sometimes one treatment is not enough and a series is needed."

Whilst Rachel is a firm believer in Western medicine she says acupuncture can compliment treatment of even the most serious diseases, and she has seen it help relieve the side-effects of radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

It can help people on antidepressants either reduce their dose or perhaps not need the medication for as long, Rachel says.

"I would never say to somebody if you're on medication you shouldn't have acupuncture, you can always improve balance, you might not cure somebody but you can help them get to the best they can be with what they've got."

I am curious how all of this stacks up from a medical perspective, so I contact doctor Jim Vause at Redwoodtown doctors. Jim says from time to time he recommends acupuncture to his patients for pain relief.

He says it does not contradict what he knows to be medically true.

He says we don't really know what causes pain. At my suggestion of a placebo effect taking place in acupuncture patients he agrees perhaps there is an element of this involved, but does not necessarily view this as being negative.

"If you look at studies when you give people white sugar pills for arthritis 40 percent get relief," he says.

Jim suggests I talk to Dr Grant Johnston at Springlands Health, a general practitioner who for the last 30 years has also practised acupuncture. Grant is an acupuncture teacher for doctors in New Zealand and part of the New Zealand Medical Acupuncture Society. "I do it every day, half my practice is acupuncture," he says.

"I do a mixture of classical, Japanese, French and Korean."

Grant became interested in acupuncture when he learned vets had started using it on animals.

He heard of it being used to treat elephants, dogs and other creatures large and small and it convinced him there had to be more in play than just a placebo effect.

`I knew placebo had a small part to play because you can't brainwash an animal.

"Thirty years ago all other doctors were saying it was just placebo but I figured they must be wrong.

"At the start of acupuncture being used doctors were very sceptical.

"I went away and did a course of muscular skeletal medicine to learn more about the science, Western medicine understands how acupuncture works."

Grant says acupuncture is no longer thought of being alternative but is now regarded as being similar to physiotherapy and manual therapies.

"There's always an element of placebo in anything any practitioner does, but the best placebo can improve is an improvement in 50 percent of cases, in acupuncture it's around 85 percent.

"Placebo is probably the best treatment because it's side-effect free."

Grant says he tries to keep up to date in developments in acupuncture.

The foundation of acupuncture is still based in traditional Chinese medicine, Jim tells me. He says the interpretation of pulses also makes sense from a medical standpoint.

"If somebody cuts themselves and loses blood their pulse changes, getting faster and weaker."

He says there are 27 different kinds of pulses that acupuncturists can learn to interpret.

 

- © Fairfax NZ News