Acupuncture Therapy
At Lu Acupuncture & Herb Clinic, every patient expects to get a personalized treatment plan, re-assessment of his or her health problems/ main concerns and corresponding therapy with modification of interventions as required.
Patient education is crucial as we help you navigate whole body treatment to ensure the best results. We provide a long lists of traditional services, each of them are applied in a specific and unique way depending on the needs and desires of our patients.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Personal Treatment Plan?
When you initially visit our acupuncture clinic, we will assess your health complaints. This one time assessment helps us to create your personalized treatment plan and get to know you better. Meanwhile, we want to read your physical exam results from your physician such as X-ray, MRI, Ultra-sound, completed blood work and etc, which we can incorporate into our TCM diagnosis. During this assessment section, the questions we will be asked are different from patients to patients that only related to your concern. Examples as below:
- The medical history of your concerns, including the doctor diagnosis, any prescribed medication or over the count medicine you taken and any allergic reaction.
- How long have you suffering this health problem, any other alternative methods helpful for your problem.
- Your lifestyle like diet, exercise preference and any other life contents you are willing to share with us.
Moreover, TCM physical exam need to be conducted for every visit, including vital signs, pulse and tongue diagnosis. After collecting all information from you enable us to create most effective and well-structured treatment protocol.
How Many Visits Does a Treatment Plan Require?
The frequency and number of acupuncture treatment needed varies on case by case. Each individual will be discussed and evaluated depending on whether long term chronic condition or acute mild problem during initial visit. We highly recommend two treatment sections for the first two weeks for everybody regardless how severe your problem are, some people experience dramatic difference or relief even after the first treatment, but some are not that sensitive and may need a couple of more treatment to see the improvement. In most case, usually eight to ten visits can solve your health problem.
Is Acupuncture Treatment Safe?
Acupuncture has no side effect, is completely safe and will not hurt, but you may experience intramuscular injection in another word “needle sensation” or “pinch-like sensation” like tingling, mosquito bite, cooling, warmth or mild electric shack, which last for a few seconds. This needling sensation also various based on different parts of your body, some areas of your body are sensitive than others. For those who suffer needle phobia definitely feel a heightened level of these sensations, so we will help them with deep breathing technique to calm down. After practitioner removed needles, you may or may not notice any subtle blood drop and small bruise developed later on, but this is normal and it will be gone soon.
Common Benefits of Acupuncture Treatment
Relieving Pain
Acupuncture highly effective on variety of short term and long term pain in a natural way. For instance, we heard patient say “I tried everything to live in pain free, but none of them works, so I just get used to this pain, accept and live in this pain.” No, nobody should live in pain regardless.
Decreases Stress, Anxiety & Depression
Acupuncture improves mental activity and decrease stress by rising serotonin hormone. So many adult patients come to our clinic to ask help because they experience high stressful life, they will say “I stress out this week” “my life is rough and stressful, and I can’t take it anymore” “I gain too much weight and I know I need to change my lifestyle but I am depressed” and is that sounds familiar to you? Absolutely, we heard those negative thoughts million times. However, if you think only adults or senior citizens are vulnerable of stressful life, you are wrong! Adolescence and teenagers are gravitating toward stress, anxiety and depression too regarding on homework, peer pressure, family dysfunction, school bully and etc. Let us make a commitment working together to bring your life back.
Increase Blood Flow
It unblocks the flow of the energy (QI) in the meridian and increases blood flow in the blood vessel to eliminate pain.
Stress Relief
Stress relief or stress management is a major issue in modern times. Acupuncture stimulates serotonin and dopamine hormones from your brain for stress relief without taking SSRI antidepressant.
Relaxes Muscles
It relaxes muscle after heavy workout or using the same group of muscle consistently, and reduces inflammation.
Boost Immune System
Acupuncture elevates the amount of blood cells in your body like red blood cells, white blood cells and anti-inflammation T-cells, it also reproduces these immune-related blood cells in order to boost your immune system and trigger your body defense function.
Pain Relief without Opioids
The opioid crisis is a very big problem right now. Acupuncture along with other therapy helping for relieving opioid addiction. Pain relief without opioids.
Safe with No Side Effects
Overall, acupuncture is safe and no side effect to all age group of people.
Acupuncture Therapy
TYPES OF ACUPUNCTURE THERAPY PLANS
CUPPING Therapy
Cupping is one of the therapeutic components of Traditional Chinese Medicine that integrates with acupuncture treatment, the principle is to localize all pain areas in the body and apply the cups which made from glass on the skin to suck up the muscle where you feel pain. In Chinese word, cupping is “Ba Guan” which means suction therapy. The consequences of this suction therapy can increase the blood flow to promote or accelerate healing process, it also significantly relieve the muscle tension to stop pain, soreness and tightness. Here in my office, we offer two types of cupping, dry cupping and wet cupping.
Dry cupping is the most commonly applied and is suction-only procedure. The strong the suction, the more relief you will feel. This suction therapy causes redness, dark purplish or just little pink circular spots on your body for up to 5-7 days.
Wet cupping requires collecting tiny amount of blood or bleeding in the cup so you may experience little pain on the surface of your skin after we remove disposable suction cups, and we will apply antibiotic ointment and bandage to you to prevent any potential infection. Again, these cupping marks will remain on your body for up to 5-7 days and some marks may last for up to 2 weeks.
For optimal treatment results, we will combine acupuncture treatment with cupping therapy to further enhance your healing process by encouraging blood flow and reinforce the pain relief.
Gua Sha Therapy
Gua Sha is another natural alternative method to treat chronic, acute pain, vertigo, motion sickness and heat stroke. This ancient Chinese treatment involves scraping your lubricated skin repeatedly in one direction with a jade or bone massage tools to promote body circulation. During this treatment, we will start with gentle pressure on your body and slowly increase the intensity of the pressure depending on how much pressure you can take. This repeated pressure strokes applied in Gua Sha trigger your body anti-inflammatory response to alleviate pain. Here in my office, we provide two types of Gua Sha, facial Gua Sha and regular Body Gua Sha.
Facial Gua Sha is technique that gently scrapes your facial and neck skin upward with a jade massage tool. This treatment helps exfoliate your skin, increase the blood flow to your skin and reduce puffiness on your face in order to make your skin youth and polished.
Body Gua Sha is the technique we used most often in our clinic; we apply stronger or more aggressive scraping on your shoulder, upper and lower back and posterior neck. This technique effectively gets rid of your body waste and release blood stagnation to alleviate pain. Body Gua Sha causes red or dark marks on your body but it will disappear in a week.
Tuina Massage Therapy
Tuina is a type of bodywork that combines massage and acupressure. The philosophy of Tuina is similar to acupuncture by using the same energetic channels and acupoints to balance and harmonize your body, achieving to better health. This therapeutic type of massage always combines with the acupuncture treatment to remove the energetic blockage and blood stagnation which manifest as diseases, illness and emotional problems. There are eight types of techniques related to Tuina massage and you may experience some of them during treatment, just keep in mind this is not gentle and relaxing massage, you probably feel some discomfort during a session by targeting specific acupoints with our hands or elbows instead of needles.
Tuina massage relieves multiple disorders including chronic or acute body pain, osteoarthritis joints pain, insomnia, digestive issues, migraine headache, stress, gynecology problems and sports related injury and more. However, the adverse effects or deal break for people who have bone fractures or are vulnerable for fractures, or any type of open wound and post surgery scars.
Moxibustion Therapy
Moxibusion, Moxa or Chinese word “Jiu” (applying heat over the skin) uses burning herbs like Mugwort (Artemisia Vulgaris, Ai Ye), this eatable botanical plant gets name from the Greek moon goddness Artemis and is effective herb for gynecological conditions. The main concept of moxa is to warm channels and expel cold, increase body circulation, and unblock stagnation and supplements contained in the moxa roll helps immune function and good for digestive issues, fatigue and more.
In my clinic, the traditional technique of using fanning the herb smoke directly on the acupuncture needles strength and lift the Qi. Another option of smokeless stick-on herb rolls releases heat over the acupuncture needles without smoke, which is beneficial for those who sensitive to smoke. Just like any other types of heat applied to the body promote blood circulation, TDP heat lamp, heating pads and cupping all have the similar effect to moxa.