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Good For What Ails You: Acupuncture pierces chronic and seasonal problems By Stephen Kurczy
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Stonington (CT) - Before walking down the aisle to exchange her wedding vows, Megan Marco's sister was a wreck: frantic, anxious. But something happened before the band began The Wedding March.“My God,” recalls her mother, Cathy Marco, “you have never seen a more calm, collective, beautiful bride.”
The source of the bride's calm was hair-thin needles that Marco had stuck into her sister's body the day of the wedding. The procedure, which Marco spent four years studying at the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine in Portland, was acupuncture.
A licensed acupuncturist at Stonington Natural Health Center, Marco claims to treat pain, insomnia, drug addiction, high blood pressure, attention deficit disorder, depression, and even nearsightedness with the prick of a needle.
With spring approaching, Marco said she will be using acupuncture to prevent clients' allergic reactions to pollen and other blooming plants. Forget using Claritin, Marco said, because pharmaceuticals suppress symptoms instead of releasing energy, which in Chinese philosophy is called qi (pronounced chi).
Pain should not be ignored or suppressed, Marco explained. It is a signal from our body that its qi is not circulating properly along the body's 12 channels, which Marco compared to 12 main arteries that keep the body in balance. For example, when the water channel is blocked, the kidney and the liver malfunction, causing a person to experience fear.
Sessions last between 10 and 45 minutes and use up to 20 needles. Marco said she can treat any organ by using acupuncture to send energy along the appropriate channel. Anger, fear and grief can all be treated by applying acupuncture to their corresponding channels.
“Our body tells us to see with different things we feel,” Marco said. “Each button tells your body something different.”
Last month, Linda Nelms of Gales Ferry lay beneath a white blanket in the Stonington Natural Health Center's winter room, its icy blue walls freckled with white snowy flecks, one of four rooms symbolizing the four seasons.
Nelms has chronic hip pain in her left side. Marco said acupuncture works by balancing the body, so she applied a series of needles, which come wrapped in paper and encased in a red plastic tube, on the Nelms' right arm and leg.
Nelms also said she hadn't been sleeping well. Marco held the tube over Nelms' forehead and tapped gently, pulled the tube away and left the needle wobbling from Nelms' skull. Marco then continued to apply needles to Nelms' arm and foot. |
Fifteen minutes into the acupuncture session, Nelms said the hip pain was gone. “I have more relief from this than from the steroid injections,” Nelms said. About a dozen needles stood like long hairs from her arm. “Since I've experienced improvement, I'm no longer skeptical.” Marco completed her undergraduate work in neuroscience at Bowdoin College in Maine before attending a four-year master's degree program in Oregon, where she said there is a more open approach to oriental medicine. “You can get woo-woo and people don't think you're weird,” she said. Jim Dowden, executive director of the American Academy of Medical Acupuncture, estimated that 6,000 medical doctors in the United States practice acupuncture and increasingly hospitals are employing acupuncturists. “This is not nearly as uncommon as it once was,” Dowden said. “Fifteen years ago the general public and certainly the medical profession would regard most acupuncturists as charlatans and quacks. We're far from that today.” Dowden said the procedure's acceptance has grown even though why it works is still unknown. “The assumption you're working on is that everything used in medicine is proved beyond doubt,” Dowden said. “Ask a scientist why aspirin works, they don't know. The same thing with acupuncture – we don't know why it works.” The National Institute of Health determined that acupuncture is efficacious in the treatment of nausea involved with anesthetic and pregnancy, for example, Dowden said, and Lincoln Hospital in New York has used acupuncture to treat 15,000 patients for substance abuse with a 60 percent success rate – about the same as a nicotine patch. Many times acupuncture is not covered by insurance, but people like Nelms who pay cash help push for future health care coverage of the treatment. Since seeing Marco's healing power on the day of her sister's wedding, Cathy Marco has become more open to acupuncture. It recently restored her sprained ankle. “Megan's attitude was there's more to life than Western medicine,” she said. Stonington Natural Health Center is located at 107 Wilcox Road. For more information, call 860-536-3880.
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All content © 2006 Jennifer G. Strong, R.Ac. (Dr.T.C.M.-Alberta), M.Ac. & O.M., Dipl. Ac. (NCCAOM)
Guthrie Acupuncture & Integrative Medicine
Clinic, #107, 2100 Guthrie
Road, Comox, British Columbia V9M 3P6 Web design by www.woodsystems.ca | |||
