How Does Acupuncture Work?

During my 25 years in prac­tice count­less people have asked me how acu­punc­ture works and you may also have pondered upon this ques­tion, before, dur­ing or after your acu­punc­ture treatment.

There is no short answer, over 3500 years of recor­ded his­tory and mil­lions of suc­cess­ful treat­ment out­comes only serve to emphas­ize the clin­ical effic­acy and diversity of this ancient heal­ing mod­al­ity and it rein­forces the dif­fi­culty trans­lat­ing the under­ly­ing factors respons­ible for Traditional Acupuncture’s incred­ible longevity.

With access to ancient clas­sical med­ical texts, some writ­ten 2500 years before the birth of Christ, mil­lions of recor­ded case his­tor­ies and an extraordin­ary vault of know­ledge based on the accu­mu­lated heal­ing expert­ise gleaned from mil­lions of suc­cess­ful treat­ments, acu­punc­ture must be close to being the most his­tor­ic­ally proven med­ical mod­al­ity on the planet today!

Millions of case his­tor­ies have been recor­ded in the ancient Chinese lan­guage known as Kanji.

I believe it is imper­at­ive that the trans­lator has a wealth of clin­ical exper­i­ence enabling them to inter­pret and sub­sequently trans­late in an accur­ate and clin­ic­ally rel­ev­ant manner.

A 1000 or so years ago emis­sar­ies from Japan trav­elled to China to study their far more soph­ist­ic­ated med­ical and legal sys­tems, some dec­ades later they returned to Japan tak­ing with them Chinese experts in the fields of medi­cine and law.

Much like Latin provided the basis for the Western legal and med­ical lan­guages, Kanji is the lan­guage upon which the Japanese med­ical and legal sys­tems are based.

As a res­ult, accur­ate and clin­ic­ally rel­ev­ant trans­la­tion of this know­ledge is restric­ted to a few highly spe­cial­ized indi­vidu­als, espe­cially in Japan.

Masakazu Ikeda sen­sei has writ­ten in the vicin­ity of 20 text­books, authored hun­dreds of journal art­icles and presen­ted hun­dreds of work­shops con­cern­ing the prac­tice of this highly spe­cial­ized med­ical art called Traditional Acupuncture. He has also been in prac­tice for mere 40 years!

How does acu­punc­ture work?

The answer to this ques­tion will always be gov­erned by the exper­i­ence and aware­ness of the per­son doing the explain­ing.
Since the per­son attempt­ing to provide an answer to this fre­quently asked ques­tion in this instance is yours truly, please allow me to provide you with some per­tin­ent and rel­ev­ant his­tor­ical details of my career and how my first visit to Japan irre­voc­ably changed my under­stand­ing of how Traditional Acupuncture works where it mat­ters, in clinic.

In 1996, at the behest my friend and col­league Edward Obaidey, a gen­tle­man flu­ent in all things Japanese and I vis­ited Masakazu Ikeda sen­sei, a mod­ern mas­ter of Traditional Acupuncture at his clinic in Imabari, Japan.
Edward’s abil­ity to accur­ately trans­late com­bined with Ikeda sensei’s immense clin­ical exper­i­ence and lin­guistic com­pet­ency cre­ated unique access to the ancient clas­sical texts and their clin­ical application.

After 13 years of prac­ti­cing what I believed to be Traditional Acupuncture I exper­i­enced a truly rude awaken­ing regard­ing the crude level of skill and extremely basic under­stand­ing that I possessed.

I real­ized I was still play­ing in the sand­pit with a bucket and spade and this mas­ter prac­ti­tioner was the head of fac­ulty at the global University.

I was stunned by Ikeda sensei’s amaz­ing clin­ical skills, his hands and fin­gers seemed to dance across the patient’s body, his med­it­at­ive focus through­out treat­ment was truly mag­netic.
Sensei’s abil­ity to trans­late his for­mid­able know­ledge and under­stand­ing of the ancient med­ical art of Acupuncture into clin­ical excel­lence was truly inspirational.

What I learned in his clinic in the dead of the Japanese winter became my vir­tual pro­fes­sional pole vault, my aware­ness of the clin­ical poten­tial of Traditional Acupuncture was ver­it­ably exploded by the way in which this mas­ter prac­ti­tioner went about his work.

I thought I was entered in the Traditional Acupuncture high jump and after 13 years in prac­tice I found myself in the pole vault without a pole!

Talk about rais­ing the bar!

In 1996, after receiv­ing treat­ment from Ikeda sen­sei and closely observing his work with patients suf­fer­ing from a vir­tual Pandora’s box of mal­ad­ies I real­ized how far that pro­ver­bial bar had been raised as a res­ult of my expos­ure to this mas­ter practitioner.

Ikeda sen­sei lived and breathed this often mis­un­der­stood heal­ing art/science, to me he rep­res­en­ted the very heart of Traditional Acupuncture and his devo­tion to the trans­la­tion of the ancient doc­trines into clin­ic­ally rel­ev­ant mater­ial provided me with an amaz­ing oppor­tun­ity to fur­ther my under­stand­ing and clin­ical applic­a­tion of Traditional Acupuncture.

His silken skills, effort­less focus and immense know­ledge were even more obvi­ous upon my return to Japan earlier this year; the con­nec­tion formed by his hands to the patient was incred­ibly mal­le­able, osmotic in the extreme.

I was inex­or­ably reminded that I had entered in the clin­ical equi­val­ent of the pole vault, the bar infin­itely higher than in the high jump and the sand pit I had been dwell­ing in was for emer­gency land­ings only.

How well acu­punc­ture works is irre­voc­ably linked to the aware­ness and skill of your prac­ti­tioner.
Like a sur­geon skill­fully using a scalpel, the acu­punc­tur­ist uses a needle dur­ing an ener­getic form of sur­gery and the most essen­tial ingredi­ent for a suc­cess­ful clin­ical out­come is the skill and sens­it­iv­ity of their hands.

The suc­cess of your treat­ment relies not on the needle or scalpel, but in the hands of your prac­ti­tioner!
In other words the potency and diversity of Traditional Acupuncture treat­ment is dir­ectly related to the skill and exper­i­ence of your practitioner.

The abil­ity to trans­late this immense body of know­ledge through their aware­ness and under­stand­ing born from clin­ical exper­i­ence, sens­it­iv­ity and skill can make all the dif­fer­ence to con­sist­ently achiev­ing suc­cess­ful clin­ical outcomes

I con­tinue to prac­tice daily in an effort to refine and develop my skill and under­stand­ing of Traditional Acupuncture, clear that elu­sive bar and do my best to trans­late my extreme good for­tune into clin­ical com­pet­ency to the ulti­mate bene­fit of my patients.

I believe it import­ant to con­vey to you the rel­ev­ance of a solid know­ledge base and clin­ical exper­i­ence prior to under­tak­ing the immense and some­what com­plex task of dis­tilling this unique ancient med­ical sys­tem into an under­stand­able diatribe for your consumption.

Traditional Acupuncture relies upon the recog­ni­tion of an ener­getic net­work that cov­ers the entire body known as meridians.