05/02/2024
Acupuncture to help with today's world
With all that's happened and happening around the world, and even here at home in Australia at the moment, It's a totally natural, indeed normal thing to feel stressed, anxious or even at times overwhelmed by it all.
Over the last few years we have had, and still do, the evolving and changing coronavirus as a worldwide pandemic the likes of which we have not seen in our lifetime. It has bought with it both fear and uncertainty. Our nation has seen both fire and flood. Around the world we have seen civil and international unrest.
Basically, it would be stranger if we didn't feel like it's all too much.
But it's not, we have evolved and developed to cope as best we can in these sort of situations and, it could be argued, much worse. We have survived war, tempest, nature, uncountable pestilence and many diseases. We're still here, it's who we are, for us, it's part of our survival strategy gained through our evolution..
We were meant to help each other through tough times, we have developed strategies and methods of dealing with things like this, our true strength is in the way we are designed to support each other through the worst we can face. It's in us all.
Part of our ability to survive and even thrive through adversity is in the skills that various medicinal therapies have developed to help us redress the effects stress has on our bodies, make no mistake about it, stress has a very real physical impact that can be truly devastating to some of us without support.
We have all felt the short term effect of stress at some stage through our lives, that heightened state of awareness, the restlessness, even that feeling of panic and desire to just get away.
The National Institute of Mental Health highlights 5 important points we need to understand about stress,
1. It affects everyone
2. Not all stress is bad
3. Long term stress can harm your health
4. There are ways to manage stress
5. If you're overwhelmed by stress, ask for help from a health professional
Stress is not something unique to our particular moment in time, some of the oldest Chinese and Western medicinal texts describe stress or conditions now understood to be stress, acupuncture texts such as the Huang Di Nei Jing even describe the effect stress has on the heart and strategies to treat stress.
There have now been many high quality studies into the benefit acupuncture can provide to those enduring the effects of stress, some studies address the differing causes of stress treated by acupuncture, others highlight the duration acupuncture gives the sufferer, going so far as to discuss up to 3 months relief.
The systematic review of completed studies and clinical trials conducted by Dr(s) John McDonald PhD and Stephen Janz concluded that the evidence clearly shows that acupuncture successfully treats both stress and anxiety through several mechanisms of action, predominately through the regulating and encouraging the natural release of the body's own hormones, but also in encouraging the body's ability to vary it's heart rate rapidly in response to stressors. This was the primary finding in a paper written by Dr(s) Kristen Sparrow and Brenda Golianu (2014) where they specifically explored the effect of acupuncture on variable heart rate, a measure of the hearts ability to adapt, react and recover from stress. They concluded that the action acupuncture does is to increase heart rate variability with within weeks, or restore the body's natural ability to adjust to stress.
Given the world's perceived outlook in relation to COVID, war, weather events and the fears and negative press shouting at us constantly, now is the ideal time to take some time for your own care, acupuncture has been clinically shown and proven to help with stress and the effect it has on us, the world is actually a pretty good place and we were all meant to enjoy it at our best.
Further reading,
5 Things you should know about stress. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
National Institutes of Health
NIH Publication No. 19-MH-8109
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/stress/index.shtml
Sparrow K. Golianu B. Does Acupuncture Reduce Stress Over Time? A Clinical Heart Rate Variability Study in Hypertensive Patients. Medical Acupuncture. 2014, Vol.26, Number 5, pp.286-294
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4203477/pdf/acu.2014.1050.pdf
