You may be wondering, do I have inflammation? So I`m going to share with you all an easy way to know and remember the signs of inflammation and how you can check for them.
There are four cardinal signs of inflammation. These four signs are found in an easy mnemonic which are their Latin names because medicine was and still is often written in Latin. These four signs are:
Calor, Dolor, Rubor and Tumor.
Let`s go through them.
Calor – this refers to a feeling of heat. Its also similar to the French word chaleur which also means heat. If you have a right wrist that isn`t healing well, feel the right wrist temperature, and then compare that with the left wrist temperature. Better yet, have someone else test both wrists for you. An elevated temperature of the area is a key sign of inflammation.
Dolor – this refers to pain. Its also similar to the French word douleur which also means pain. Pain is often the first signal that something is wrong and the signal we tend to act on quickly. Pain and inflammation are linked because inflammation creates pain. Pains` function is to put us into fast action to care for the injury. If pain has gone on longer than six weeks, youre now dealing with chronic pain. In a chronic pain case, acupuncture points that help the body turn off continuous pain signaling by the nervous system will also be used.
Rubor – refers to colour, the reddish colour that happens during an inflammatory process when blood has rushed to an area to feed the injured tissues, providing key nutrients to the area as the building blocks of the repair process. Blood flow to the area is part of the acute healing process. However, acute inflammation should not become chronic, meaning more than six weeks. If you`re still having signs of inflammation past six weeks what you want to do is get in for acupuncture treatment to decrease inflammation in general as well as decrease inflammation to the injured area. The acupuncture treatment goal will be to increase micro-circulation to the injured areas, and the affected channels so that the repair work can complete and the inflammatory process can be put to rest.
Tumor – is just like the English word we use with the same spelling. Tumor in Latin simply means swelling. You can check for swelling of an injured area by comparing the size of your right wrist for example, versus the size of your left wrist. The swelling happens because of the increased blood flow to the area that is there to complete the repair work of the injured tissues. Again, although swelling is a normal part of acute injury, this process should not be going on longer that six weeks. If your knee is so swollen to the point that you haven`t seen it in a year, it`s time to come in and get acupuncture and clear up the swelling by increasing circulation to the area.
Are you noticing any of these four signs? If you have even one or two of these signs, its very likely that inflammation is part of the picture. Give me a call at 647-378-3182 and let`s talk about getting you out of inflammation and allow your injury to complete the repair process.
You may be getting acupuncture treatments and wondering, how do I know if it’s really working? You may have never had any explanation for what signs to look for and the healing process can be gradual. So here I will share with you five signs you can look for. It’s unlikely that you would have all five signs so please don’t be waiting for all of them to happen. Most often it would be one or two signs per issue being treated, depending on the nature of the complaint.
#1. The area of the complaint, or the area of pain starts shrinking. An example of this is someone coming for shoulder pain, initially the shoulder pain can be all over the shoulder, the front, side and back of the shoulder. After a few treatments the pain is only at the back of the shoulder. The size of the area is smaller.
#2. The pain or complaint is diffusing, spreading out across a larger area but becoming less intense as it spreads out. In this case the pain is
leaving by fading out. I’ve seen this with headache pain where the pain was once very localized and fixed and after a few minutes the feeling spreads out but becomes lighter and lighter as spreads and fades away. I’ve also seen this happen with skin rashes, say an angry red rash above the knee, with a few treatments it spreads across the thigh but as it spreads the colour changes becoming lighter and lighter from red to pink and then fading into skin colour as it disappears. This sign can be a little confusing at first because it may seem like it’s worse because the area is larger but since the intensity is less and less, this is a sign that it is fading out and leaving the body.
#3. A stubborn old symptom changes in a new way. An example of this would be a migraine that always happens over the right eye, for years the person has suffered migraines, and reliably always over the right eye. Then after a few treatments, the migraine shows up over the left eye instead! When there is a stubborn symptom that has gone on for years and nothing seems to fix it or change it in any way and then after acupuncture it changes, this is a great sign. Yes, the pain or complaint is still there, but it’s a positive development because if the pain or symptom that was unmoving starts to move then it’s a good sign that acupuncture can get it to move out of the body completely with more treatment. Healing often happens on stages so this may be the first sign that the treatment is working, and with more treatment it should clear further and further.
A common example I’ve seen repeatedly is where a person comes in with lateral hip pain and after some treatment, the pain is now on the lower back or around the SI joint. It’s not that the pain has actually moved. We have to think of healing as peeling layers of an onion. So the pain from the hip resolved, and that was an outer layer, and then once that layer got cleared, now the deeper layers of issues or pain such as the low back are felt. This is happening because pain signals are competitive. We can usually only feel the worst pain signals at any one time and older areas of pain or milder complaints fall into the background until the most pressing issue gets cleared. Often as the healing progresses the pain or complaints will happen in reverse order from how they occurred, so in this case the low back pain is usually the older symptom and will usually take more time to clear because of it’s longer history.
This symptom can also be harder to detect because the pain can sometimes move from one channel to another channel that is merely an inch or two away. It can seem that the pain is still at the elbow, and it is, but one channel has been cleared of pain and now another layer needs to be worked on for the full healing to be seen.
#4. Symptoms are moving from the top, downwards. This one can often
go unrecognized as a sign of healing but it is well understood from Herrings Law of Cure. If the symptom is moving is this direction, top to bottom, rather than the reverse, this is a good sign. This can be likened to leaving a building, it’s down the elevator and out the door. An example of this is with heat symptoms, a person comes in complaining of feeling waves of heat in their head. After a few treatments the heat feeling has moved to the chest, and after another treatment, the heat feeling is only in the thighs and then it’s gone.
#5. The pain or issue happens less often or for a shorter period of time. This one is pretty obvious but still worth mentioning because it’s helpful to have a baseline before treatment is started. It helps to know how often, for how long, and how severely a symptom is happening at the beginning of the treatment. This helps you to see what’s changing and also to share with your acupuncturist for them to understand your progress. For example, if you’re having sleeping problems, how often are you waking up at night, and how long before you fall back to sleep? With treatment there should be fewer wake-ups and falling back to sleep happens sooner, and the following morning you should feel less tired. Or in the case of afternoon fatigue, perhaps initially the fatigue would start at 2 pm and happen until 6 pm, but with treatments now the fatigue happens from 4-5 pm.
What you should have is at least some small shift within the first 1-3 treatments to know that your acupuncture protocol is working, then if this is the case, further treatments should clear up the issue completely. If there has been zero change after three treatments then what I will definitely do at this point, if not before, is to switch to another protocol to get the healing happening because the body wants to heal. The body has vital force and acupuncture stimulates that vital force. It’s the same thing if a patient hits a plateau, they were healing up nicely and then after a while they hit a plateau and now symptoms are stable but not progressing further. In this case, a different protocol would be used, for example, opening up all 12 main acupuncture channels is often enough to activate the healing response again.
So there you have five specific signs you can look for after you’ve had several treatments. For each acupuncture treatment, please give your body at least 24-48 hours to respond to the treatment. Acupuncture works in a series of treatments to achieve a result. If it’s an old issue that’s been there for years it will usually take a few months of regularly biweekly treatments. Sometimes there will be a healing crisis where symptoms can feel worse for a few hours or a day or two, after which the issue will feel better than before treatment.
Osteoarthritis is said to affect 500 million worldwide and one in five adults in the US. With so many affected it’s good to know the ins and outs of how it develops and how it gets treated for pain relief, healing and prevention.
You may have had it explained by your doctor that your arthritis is “bone on bone” and as the bones of the joint rub together, the cartilage at the end of the bone wears away leaving a rough surface instead of a smooth surface. When the joints rub against a rough surface this can inflame the tissues and create more pain.
You may still be wondering what caused the cartilage to wear away?
In essence it comes down to a deficiency of the affected channels and tissues. This also correlates with why we see more osteoarthritis is older people who also tend to have more channel deficiency. For example, osteoarthritis of the hip joint reflects a deficiency of the Gall Bladder channel that runs through the femoral head.
Osteoarthritis of the knee
joint reflects either a Stomach or Spleen channel deficiency in most cases. The Stomach channel runs through the lateral knee and the Spleen channel runs through the medial side of the joint. Similarly, after a trauma, osteoarthritis may begin to form whereby the original trauma creates a deficiency in the channel which, if unresolved, can lead to incomplete healing of bone and sets the stage for osteoarthritis.
How is Osteoarthritis treated conventionally?
The most common treatment for osteoarthritis is medication: NSAIDs, cortisone shots, and Tylenol. While medications may provide temporary relief, they do come with some serious side effects when used long term. I will go over this below. Physiotherapy can help strengthen muscles surrounding the joints however this alone is not healing bone tissue. Surgery is a last resort and can often be prevented by using acupuncture and nutrition as described further below.
NSAIDs refers to non- steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. These include ibuprofen, naproxen, and Voltaren. NSAIDs reduce the pain but harm the stomach. NSAIDs stop prostaglandins from being made by the stomach. Prostaglandins are a substance that protects the lining of the stomach from stomach acid. Without prostaglandins, the stomach forms ulcers. Patients will need
to be on broad spectrum digestive enzymes for 3 – 6 months to fix this issue. When the stomach organ is weakened it leads to all kinds of nutritional deficiencies down the road.
Cortisone shots are used to quell the inflammation because cortisone is a natural anti-inflammatory. However, cortisone shots are a hormone therapy. Hormones work on feedback loops so that the exogenous cortisone causes the body’s own innate production of cortisone to stop. When this happens, you have less cortisone and the effect of the shot stops working.
If Tylenol is being used for osteoarthritis pain, the main concern is liver damage. Tylenol creates liver inflammation and liver damage. Tylenol-induced liver damage can be treated using electrical acupuncture on the Liver channel and the dermatome spinal level that supplies nerves that feed into the liver. Although you may not be ready to go off pain meds completely, you can take a gradual approach of tapering down the pain meds as the acupuncture effects kick in.
How does acupuncture treat pain?
Electrical acupuncture at a low hertz causes the release of ACTH and beta -endorphins that have up to 30 times the power of morphine. There are also specific acupuncture points that produce a global reduction in pain and inflammation due to the endorphin production. The effect of these is not instant, because the body takes about 24 hours to make endorphins in response to acupuncture treatment. In this way acupuncture addresses the main symptom which is pain as well as the underlying tissue damage which I will go over below.
Many studies have shown that acupuncture is an effective treatment for osteoarthritis. One study looking at 18000 patients found that acupuncture was effective for multiple pain conditions including knee osteoarthritis.
How can acupuncture heal osteoarthritis?
To understand how the cartilage got stripped off the bone and how that gets reversed, we need to look at pH. In terms of health, the ideal pH of the blood cells needs to be at -7.365. Unfortunately, many people in the world have acidic blood. What happens when blood becomes acidic? Acidic blood cells will pull calcium ions from the interstitial fluid to buffer the acidity. This now creates more acidic interstitial fluid. What happens when the interstitium becomes acidic? It pulls calcium ions from the bones to buffer it. This bone tissue, having lost ions, then starts to break down and become rough, making movement of the joint painful.
Acupuncture heals osteoarthritic tissues by healing deficiency of electricity in the affected channels as well as deficient dermatomes and tissue levels.
Electrical acupuncture heals the bones and joints by restoring alkaline pH as electrons move from the electrode wire to the acupuncture needle into the tissues. In essence, pH means the percentage of hydrogen atoms that creates a negative charge. Healthy blood is pH -7.365 = -20.8 millivolts. To restore healthy pH, electrons, which are negatively charged are added comfortably to the channels and tissues via electrical stimulation acupuncture. This results in healthier tissue terrain that is alkaline. Alkaline blood transfers excess alkalinity to the interstitium. When the interstitium is alkaline, the surplus of negative ions are then donated back to the bones to form smooth cartilage so that joints can move easily and without pain.
What nutrients are most important for healing osteoarthritis?
In addition to acupuncture, best results can be obtained by providing the right nutrition to the joints. Three common issues with osteoarthritis are: calcium-magnesium balance, vitamin D and digestive enzymes.
What is the correct calcium-magnesium balance?
When the body is putting calcium deposits on the bones, as in bone spurring, osteophytes, this is an issue of calcium not being properly absorbed which is often due to magnesium deficiency. Most people need more magnesium because modern diets tend to be low due to soil depletion and many food products are fortified with calcium which throws off the correct calcium-magnesium balance.
Magnesium levels should be at least half or equal to the amount of calcium in your intake. You can try magnesium malate or chelate, however if there are digestive issues with magnesium you may
need to try another version of magnesium and try to not take too much at once. A easy way around any digestive issues is to use a topical magnesium like a spray or a rub-on oil. You can rub this all over your arms, legs and abdomen morning and night. This may feel itchy at first and if so, it’s a sign that your magnesium levels are too low, In this case keep supplementing magnesium and the itching or tingling will go away as your magnesium levels normalize.
How much vitamin D do I need? Vitamin D allows calcium to move into the bones. 2000 IUs is the minimum daily dose. I do recommend 30 000 IUs per week which amounts to 4000-5000 IUs per day.
Why do I need digestive enzymes? The mesoderm of bone is largely supplied by the energy of the Spleen and Stomach channels. The majority of the population has deficiency in the Stomach and Spleen channels. One simple way to effectively improve the functioning of the Stomach and Spleen channels apart from acupuncture is to take a broad spectrum digestive enzyme before meals. Minerals that make up bone tissue are also the hardest micro nutrient to break down especially when there is low stomach acid or low stomach functioning.
How can osteoarthritis be prevented?
The cause of osteoarthritis is a deficiency of electrical charge of the channels and tissues plus nutrient deficiency/toxins. This means that the prevention of osteoarthritis involves:
Maintaining healthy pH in the channels and tissues. This is done both through regular electrical acupuncture and very importantly though blood electrification which can be done as part of an acupuncture treatment or as a daily self-treatment using the Silver Pulser (sota.com) or similar device. Blood electrification helps keep the blood and thereby all tissues alkaline which not only benefits osteoarthritis but also helps in the healing and prevention of all disease.
Optimal levels if minerals through maintaining correct calcium-magnesium balance, vitamin D and digestive enzymes to ensure complete breakdown and absorption of minerals from food. Most people in the developed world are low in magnesium, vitamin D and have poor stomach functioning.
Removing energy leaks that prevent healing such as exposure to dirty electricity (EMF, cell phones, smart watches, oura rings, etc). Take steps to protect yourself from dirty EMF such as by not carrying cell phones close to your body or in the bedroom at night, and by using grounding mats or grounding straps on your shoes and boots to discharge the dirty electricity (earthingcanada.ca, or earthing.com) . Other forms of energy leak can come from dental issues (mercury, root canals), stuck magnetic fields, and toxins.
If you or a loved one has been experiencing pain from osteoarthritis without relief, now is the time to take action. Give me a call /text at 647-378-3182 and let’s get your bones and joints healing up and aching less.
Effectiveness and Safety of Acupuncture for Migraine: An Overview of Sys…Migraine is a common neurological disease, which burdens individuals and society all over the world. Acupuncture…
How does acupuncture help headaches and migraines?
Acupuncture can relieve headaches and migraines in five main ways:
Reduces inflammation . Inflammation leads to pain, when inflammation is treated, pain is reduced or cleared altogether.
Mitigates pain. Beta-endorphins (natural pain-relievers made by the body in response to electrical acupuncture) are produced in response to a low hertz frequency.
Relieves muscle tension in head, neck and shoulders. Muscle tension is often related to stress-headaches. By relaxing muscle groups in these areas, headache pain can start to disappear.
Increases micro-circulation to the head, neck and shoulders. When the muscles in the head, neck and shoulders are relieved of tension through regulated blood flow, the outcome is pain relief.
Improves physical health and well-being. When stress modulated hormones (cortisol, dopamine, adrenaline, serotonin) are balanced, it is much easier to manage stress and less likely for stress to trigger a headache.
How are headaches and migraines diagnosed in acupuncture medicine?
At the beginning of the session you will be asked where your headache pain is felt. The areas of pain are a key aspect of treatment as they relate to excesses and deficiencies of the main channels covering the head. These issues involve the:
1) The Stomach channel (yellow line) – relates to frontal headaches, cheek and jaw pain
2) The Bladder channel (blue line) – relates to inner eyebrow pain and occipital headache
3) The Triple Warmer channel (purple line)- relates to temporal headache that may also involve neck, ear and shoulder tension
4) The Gall Bladder channel (green line) – covers a large portion of the sides of the head and forehead and is the most common issue with headaches
5) Liver system – relates to pain behind the eyes and/or crown of the head
What about women with migraines?
Women may experience a pattern of migraines or headaches around or just before their menstrual cycle. If you are a cycling woman and you don’t know your headache triggers you may want to track the timing to see if it lines up with your cycle. If hormone shifts are part of your headache picture, your acupuncture treatment can address your hormones so that you can achieve hormone balance as well as headache relief.
Migraines in particular tend to follow a pattern of Liver / Gall Bladder Stagnation with Stomach/Spleen Qi Deficiency. The Liver and Gall Bladder system becomes “Excess” which is why there may be a visual aura (the Liver channel “opens to the eyes” and is responsible for healthy vision). The Excess of the Liver and Gall Bladder systems then overpowers (weakens) the Stomach and Spleen systems creating the common experience of nausea and in severe cases vomiting. All the endocrine glands fall directly within the Stomach and Spleen channels so this explains one way the hormones go out of balance when these channels become depleted.
How are headaches and migraines treated with acupuncture?
The strategy for treating headaches and migraines is to first assess which channel(s) are affected and treat those. The second is to use pain relieving points that cause your body to make the feel-good chemicals, the endorphins. Stimulation of endorphin-producing points will take about 24 hours to achieve their full effect as it takes this long for the body to make endorphins in response to acupuncture. The third aspect of treatment is to address nutritional deficiencies or toxins that may be causing the headaches/migraines or interfering with their healing.
What about head trauma?
For head pain that results from physical trauma to the head after an injury, the Pointoselect tool is used to measure low electrical resistance on the skin on points related to areas of the brain (i.e. frontal lobe, occipital lobe, parietal lobe, etc.) that may have been injured. Electrical acupuncture is then applied to those areas indicating low electrical resistance (low energy) to provide healing energy to the areas that need it the most as identified by the Pointoselect.
How will I know if the acupuncture is working?
Typically, in the case of headaches and migraines, and depending on your pattern of occurrence, you will begin to notice at first either a reduction in intensity of pain, shrinkage of areas of pain and/or reduced frequency of headaches. Usually there is some change within the first three treatments.
If you’ve had headaches or migraines for 20 years, your first change may be that left side headache pattern shifts to right side or some other change in location. This is considered a very good sign because pain that starts to move means your headache pattern is breaking up. If I can get the pain to move then it’s the beginning of getting the pain to move out of your body completely. A change in pain location is much better than pain that remains fixed in the same location all the time.
It’s also important to understand that pain is by nature competitive. This means that the nervous system which modulates pain can only signal a few areas of strong pain at any one time. So you will usually only feel one or two main areas of pain at once. Then when the initial pain area starts to heal, other areas may start to feel painful, that previously were not painful. It’s not that you suddenly have new pain but more that since other areas have resolved, you can now receive the pain signals from these other layers that are being uncovered, similar to peeling an onion.
You may notice that these other areas of pain have had issues in the past that didn’t get resolved. For example, before your headaches started, you were having hip pain. The headache pain got worse and you stopped noticing the hip pain and forgot about it. Now that the headaches are resolving, you feel your hip pain again. These older layers that got put on the back burner can now get fully resolved.
What else can I do to relieve or prevent headache or migraine pain?
The first step is to rule out dehydration since lack of water or fluids is an easy fix and a common cause of irregular headaches. Sometimes dehydration is not easily fixed by simply drinking more water. If you find that you are still thirsty after drinking more water and are peeing out the water more than usual, the solution may be that you need electrolytes. A simple way to add electrolytes is to use Celtic or Himalayan sea salt (try one 1/4 teaspoon added to your water) or drink coconut water. If that doesn`t solve it, you may need a more comprehensive electrolyte blend such as Re-Lyte or similar that is a mix of sodium bicarbonate, magnesium, calcium and potassium in a powder form. Mix with water for a nice-tasting drink.
2) Keep a headache diary. Consider the time when the headaches/ migraines first appeared, triggers and anything relating to their recurrence. Caffeine withdrawal from quitting or reducing intake of coffee or even tea can create severe headache for a day or so.
3) Since many headaches and migraines have a Liver/Gall Bladder channel imbalance as part of the picture, you may want to look for things in your diet/lifestyle/medications that could be causing this imbalance.
4) Rule out side-effects of your medications by looking them up on drugs.com. Lyrica has headaches listed as a common side-effect. Tylenol is hard on the liver. Relying on Tylenol for long term pain relief may be significantly contributing to headaches and migraines. There are other alternative forms of pain relief, acupuncture being a major one. Acupuncture can also be used to detox and repair liver damage from medications.
5) In terms of diet, foods that are harder on the liver/gall bladder include alcohol, plasticky “fake” fats such as margarines, or any hydrogenated oils such as hydrogenated peanut butter, denatured oils found in processed canola oil, factory processed baked goods, and deep-fried seed oils such as that found in potato or tortilla chips. Try reducing these fats and replacing them with coconut oil, extra virgin olive oil, organic butter and /or organic tallow or lard for liver-friendly fats that remain more stable at high temperatures. The liver is the body`s chemical processing plant so anything that is unnatural is unrecognizable and puts an added burden on the liver (think Splenda, aspartame, artificial flavourings, colourings, GMO foods).
If you or a loved one has been experiencing headaches or migraines without relief, now is the time to take action.
Call or text me at 647-378-3182 and we can discuss how to best help you or a loved one get relief from pain and bring things back into balance.
Cynthia's Classical Acupuncture and Wellness 