Acupuncture For Women's Health

By Elizabeth Fellows, LAc

Center Point Healing

. https://www.centerpointhealing.com/

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Acupuncture For Women's Health

Chinese medicine is the world's oldest continuously practiced form of medicine. Many people associate it only with treating body pain, but it can also be used to treat many women's health issues. Acupuncture and Chinese medicine can be used to treat patients with menstrual problems, fertility challenges, menopausal symptoms, and uterine fibroids.

Chinese medicine is a self-contained system of medicine with its own anatomy and physiology to diagnose and treat these problems. Even if you have a Western medical diagnosis of unexplained infertility, for example, we can still derive a diagnosis within the Chinese medical system and treat you according to that diagnosis. The diagnosis is based on the condition of your Qi (vital energy) and blood (in Chinese medicine, the blood is both the substance flowing through your veins and arteries as well as a special substance linked to our emotions and memories), Yin and Yang. Because this is a holistic way of looking at the patient, we take into account not just the symptoms manifesting in your body but also your emotional and spiritual life.

In Chinese medicine, there is a direct connection between the heart and the uterus. Sometimes when someone experiences an emotionally traumatic event, her periods will either stop or become irregular. This is because the heart has been shocked by the emotional trauma and the connection to the uterus has become blocked. We can treat this condition with needles placed in acupuncture points to restore the connection, and the periods will resume or become regular again.

When we see patients with uterine fibroids we have many non-invasive, non-pharmaceutical options for treatment. If the fibroids are causing heavy periods, we first treat the symptom by stopping the bleeding. This can be accomplished using acupuncture and/or a course of herbal medicine. While we are treating the symptom, we will also be treating the underlying cause of the problem, usually a form of Qi or blood stagnation in the uterus. Depending on the age of the patient and her plans for having children (or not) we can often manage the fibroids so that she will not need invasive surgical procedures or hormonal therapy in order to regain a normal, manageable menstrual cycle.