Adventures in Acupuncture Part 1

For the past few months I have been going through acupuncture therapy, primarily for the IT Band injury that dashed my marathon dreams (no pun intended). The great thing about holistic medicine, though, is that due to the very fact that it's holistic, treatment is basically one stop shopping for all of your ailments. Anxiety, depression, hormones, gastrointestinal disorders...you name it, they'll poke it!

I was at first a tad skeptical about using acupuncture to heal my leg injury. After many months off the leg and lots of strengthening and stretching, I was still experiencing pretty severe pain when I tried to do anything more than walk. I figured it might just be the end of my distance running career. But, since I had no other real choice except PT, which the orthopedic surgeon didn't even seem that convinced of, I figured I'd give it another shot. Without going too in depth about the process and my progress in this post, I'll at least say that I'm now up to 13 ish miles and running my first half marathon back this coming Sunday.

What I appreciate most about acupuncture is that it truly is a holistic approach to care -- every symptom your body shows is related to another, and has to be treated as such. This means that to treat your problems, the therapist actually has to listen to you and help connect the dots. That's right...listen! Really, acupuncture is half psycho-therapy/half physio-therapy and it's a very new experience for me to have someone treating me actually listen to everything that's going on with my body and, more than that, not tell me I'm crazy. (This isn't even that specific of a reference, just a general note about Western doctors who are now so zoned into their computers during visits that traditional standards of human interaction are completely stricken from existence).



One of the most fascinating aspects of traditional Chinese medicine is the diagnosis approach. In addition to asking questions about your history and current state, there are a few primary tests that they do each visit. The first of which, my favorite, is the tongue test. That's right, the tongue test. They don't run blood tests, they don't listen to your heart, they look at your tongue. Until I had my first tongue diagnosis, I had no clue that tongues could be so different, but in actuality they are each unique and tell the story of your health. After my first diagnosis, my acupuncturist told me what she saw in my tongue and then took out a big book o' tongues to show me the wide variety. In all honesty, the book is pretty nasty, but it's been rather remarkable to watch the shape and color of my tongue transform over the past few months...the ripples on the sides are gone and the color is becoming redder and less filmy by the day! Aren't you proud?