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.

Yours in health,

Cynthia McGilvray, R. Ac.