As acupuncturists, when we insert an needle to the patient, we not only need to understand his muscular skeleton issue, also need to understand the patient's energy lever, emotional state,  we work with each individual differently,  even they have similar neuromuscular and muscular skeleton issues. A young man with sciatic  pain needs different care than an elderly. Also same person at different stage of life( most of my patients stay with me for years, thanks for their trust) our treatment should change as well,  because the body energy is changing as we are going through different phases of life.

For young people, as they come in with pain, I might use mostly opening method with my needles ( in Chinese medicine, if there is pain, there is blockage). But for elderly, the pain and blockage can cause by the weakness of the body, then you need understand the body fully and make a decision how you are going to start the treatment, you nourish him first then works with pain afterward, or vice versa, or do it at the same time, this decision requires years of training and deep understand of TCM theory. This is a simple example how we work with our patients.

To me, each treatment is a conversation between me and my patient, how I listen to their body and work with them is very important. Sometimes I will totally ignore the pain just work with the whole body and let the body heal the pain by itself. 

In the healing world there is no war, we all work together in a different level or aspect to help our patients. Each therapy had its own strength and weakness, for acupuncture, from thousands of years practice on human body with profound understanding of our body in a different way, needles are the strength. For people without this kind of training, they can hurt patients.

 I highly respect PT's work, my left knee ACL totally torn 2 years ago, with acupuncture, herbal medicine, osteopathic treatment, physical therapy, no surgery, no pain killer at all. Healing world is a team work, as a practitioner we need understand our strength and weakness, work together to give the best to our patients .

Take care

Huang Yu