Treating asthma through acupuncture may seem a strange way of addressing this common disease. Asthma affects around 20 million Americans. Acupuncture is an alternative esoteric, and mysterious medical healing technique. For those masses of people who suffer from asthma, perhaps it’s time to consider acupuncture treatment for your condition.
If you have asthma, then you know breathing can be an issue when an asthma attack comes. Most of us never think about breathing since it’s an automatic process in our body that we never need to be consciously aware of. We only care about it when we become very anxious that we start to hyperventilate or when we develop a certain kind of illness that makes breathing a bit difficult to do such as what happens in asthma. For asthmatics, breathing is always on their minds since every time an attack comes they end up gasping for air. These attacks can be either predictable or unpredictable, there are attacks that that may require immediate medical attention and there are attacks that can be managed at home. More and more people are looking for safer but equally effective ways of treating asthma symptoms since asthma medications come with unwanted side effects, and at times, aren’t enough to provide adequate relief to the patient. This is the reason why some asthma sufferers have turned to acupuncture in Palm Harbor for asthma.
There is no cure for asthma. It is a chronic disease that comes in various forms although the symptoms and signs they produce are all the same: sweating, an uncomfortable sensation of suffocation, rapid heartbeat, and rapid breathing. Modern science does not know what the exact cause of asthma is although it has been established that genetics plays a significant role in its development. Factors that can trigger an asthma attack usually come from the environment and can include pollution, dust, cold, etc. During an attack, constriction and inflammation of the respiratory pathways limit the amount of air that can be inhaled. An attack can vary in length from as short as a few minutes to as long as several hours. As mentioned a while back, asthma has no cure; nevertheless, there is never ending research to seek new modes of treatment, and there are patients and practitioners who believe that acupuncture is the right treatment for asthma.
Acupuncture is an ancient Chinese healing technique although its name is derived from two Latin words, acus=needle and pungere=to puncture. There is still some debate as to where acupuncture really originated, although there is global consensus that it is it intimately connected to China. Extremely slender needles are inserted into certain parts of the body during a typical acupuncture procedure. The needles just barely penetrate the surface of the skin at strategic points in the body. It is believed that the needles rectify a disharmony in the flow of qi (pronounced chee) energy within the body. This disharmony is believed to be the cause of illness. Western conventional medicine has devised a number of theories about how acupuncture works. One very popular theory is that the treatment stimulates the release of endorphins and other natural pain relievers.
But a very important question to ask is does acupuncture work, especially for asthma? It depends on the person you are asking. Acupuncturists wholeheartedly agree that their treatment works very well against asthma especially, asthma in young children. You can go online and visit scores of websites and read thousands of testimonials that all bear witness to acupuncture’s efficacy in the treatment of asthma. Many will say that acupuncture has worked where everything else has failed.
But when you ask the same question – does acupuncture work for asthma? – to scientists and doctors who all their life have used nothing else but Western conventional treatments and have been trained in Western scientific methodology and medicine, the answer will be quite different. For them, acupuncture is a curiosity that even though they may not have the answer as to how it really works, decisively believe that it does not work in treating illnesses such as asthma, at all. So far, Western scientific method has found no conclusive evidence that acupuncture for asthma works, and dozens of review of the scientific studies that have tried to answer this question have shown acupuncture not to be an effective method for treating asthma. The best explanation they can come up with is that acupuncture produces a placebo effect. This effect states that medical procedures and techniques as well as drugs may be perceived effective by the patient and this leads to certain positive results.
So does acupuncture really work in treating asthma? It all depends on what you believe. If you have asthma, have tried acupuncture treatment, and have gotten relief of the signs and symptoms of asthma, then you know that it really works. Conversely, if after trying out acupuncture for your asthma and are still bothered by its symptoms, then for you acupuncture, does not work for asthma at all. It’s as simple as that. There’s no way to tell whether acupuncture works for you or not, unless you try it out. The treatment anyway is very safe. Who knows it may be the treatment that will help overcome your asthma symptoms for a long time.