The Needles Communicate (Part 1)

Patients sometimes ask whether acupuncture is really just Shiatsu or acupressure with needles instead of massage. I answer that yes, they are similar, as they rely on the same points and channel system developed in China several thousand years ago, yet they are different in their mechanism and therapeutic effect. In my opinion acupuncture needles communicate something unique to the body that other forms of bodywork do not. I will try to illustrate this with an example. 

I recently treated a patient with an old arm injury that had flared up. As an acupuncturist there are many ways I can approach treating such an injury, one of which is to treat it as a local problem and only place needles near the site of injury. In the case of an arm injury, I would limit the placement of needles to the injured arm only, on points that correspond to the pathway of acupuncture channels affected by the injury. As it turns out, this approach did not produce much benefit to the patient, so at one of the following sessions I tried a different approach. I needled several acupuncture points on each of the four limbs, without placing special emphasis on the injured arm. The patient reported improvement the next day. We continued with this approach for several more treatments and the patient reported further improvement each time. 

Why would a more 'global' treatment approach prove more effective than local treatments in this particular case? There could be several explanations for this, but I would suggest the following:

When the body suffers a local injury, the body’s immediate response is to isolate the site of injury from the rest of the body. This is done as a precaution, probably before there has been a chance to really assess the nature and scope of the injury. For some kinds of injuries, for example, bleeding or poisoning, time is of the essence and it makes sense to take measures to protect the healthy parts of the body and prevent a local injury from turning into a systemic problem. This isolation of the injured part - what I will call the isolation reaction - seems to take place quite automatically at several levels of functioning, including neural, circulatory, and even psychological. Local swelling around a site of injury is an example of this isolation reaction.

In particular cases it may be that isolating a local injury is not at all useful, or it may be that it is useful for only a definite time. Eventually, whether it be after a few minutes, several hours, or even many weeks, the isolation reaction needs to subside so that the injured part can be reintegrated with the functioning of the body as a whole.  Often this reintegration takes place without issue and recovery from an injury is complete. However, in the case of many chronic injuries, the isolation reaction never fully subsides, resulting in only partial reintegration and recovery.

Acupuncture, as with many other kinds of bodywork, seems to help stimulate the process of reintegration. The manner by which acupuncture promotes reintegration sets it apart, in my opinion, from other forms of bodywork, and it seems to do so in the following way: 
  
During an acupuncture treatment, several needles - perhaps a dozen or more - are inserted into acupuncture points and kept there for 20-40 minutes. With the needles in place something quite incredible begins to happen: the needles begin communicating with one another, and collectively, begin communicating with the brain. What is it that the needles communicate? I suspect that they are relaying information to one another, and collectively to the brain, about how different parts of the body are related to the whole. It is this information about relationship that the brain needs to fully let go of the isolation reaction. 

In the case of my patient who benefited from global rather than local treatments, it seems to me that the treatments worked because the needles communicated something to brain about how the injured arm was related to the other limbs, and to the functioning of the body as a whole. Once this information was relayed, the brain was able to initiate a healing response on its own.