So most people have heard about the wonders of acuuncture for musculoskeletal problems, that is, problems like arthritis, ligament injuries, back problems, etc. Truly, acupuncture is wonderful for all of thsoe things for us as well as for our four footed friends, but did you know acupuncture does so much more than that?

Acupuncture doesn’t just work for those things, but for most internal medicine complaints as well. That is to say, appetite issues? Acupuncture. Skin problems? Acupuncture. Inflammatory bowel disease? Acupuncture.
About the only diagnosis I really don’t do acupuncture for is cancer. Herbs can work great for cancer, but we generally avoid acupuncture near the tumor as it can send more energy to the tumor which is the opposite of what we are trying to do.

I tend to work a lot with herbs, so generally I turn to them for internal medicine problems, however, sometimes we can’t. One of my patients recently is a cat who has recurrent pancreatitis. He refuses to take herbs in any form so to manage his condition we needed to take a different approach. I decided to do some acupuncture on the first visit to refine my diagnosis (before we knew he wasn’t going to cooperate for herbs), and the improvement was so drastic that we kept at it.

For the vast majority of conditions that respond to acupuncture we do a treatment series of four treatments a week apart. After those four treatments many acute conditions are resolved! For more chronic conditions we usually need to continue treatments but start to space the treatments out to the maximum tolerated interval. Most patients get to a point where they can have a treatment every month or two to maintain them.

Have a cat, dog, horse, or other animal friend that you think acupuncture would help? Give me a call and we can have a conversation about them and see what modalities will help out the most.

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