ACUPUNCTURE

Acupuncture and TCM can support Women’s Health:

1. Overall Health & Wellbeing and Pain Relief

Even though this isn’t specific to women’s health, we must still start here. We always aim to treat you as a whole person. Even if you’re coming for help with something specific, we still always must check in with the simple things that affect us all, such as stress, sleep, digestion, energy, pain, mental health, etc.

In our modern lives, we’ve all become very good at going into our stress response (fight or flight) to help keep up pace with work, families and life. There’s nothing wrong with our fight or flight response, until it becomes chronic, making it harder to switch into the opposite state of our parasympathetic (rest and digest) response. As this happens, our bodies become less efficient at recovering and healing on a daily basis, which over time can lead to a variety of issues.

We use acupuncture to help support healthy digestion, restore sleep patterns, reduce pain, boost energy and uplift moods as a foundation to our treatments. Improving these areas goes a long way to supporting specific issues within women’s health and pain conditions like sciatica, arthritis,  low back pain, migraines / headaches, TMJ issues,  body stiffness or swelling.

2. Menstrual Health

Acupuncture has long been used to help regulate and support healthy menstruation. Over the years, Chinese medicine recognized and developed treatments for issues around women’s menstrual cycles including PMS symptoms, painful periods (dysmenorrhoea), irregular cycles, abnormal loss of period (amenorrhoea), heavy bleeding (menorrhagia), spotting, etc. When supporting menstrual health, we take a detailed history of symptoms specific to your period as well as general health. We then come up with a treatment plan and track improvements over at least 3 cycles – looking for gradual improvements in symptoms as well as overall health.

3. Fertility

Many women seek out acupuncture to help support fertility for natural conception or in combination with IVF. While our treatment approaches change slightly according to  where you might be on your cycle, if you’re currently trying, or where you’re at in a particular IVF process, there is an underlying focus on helping relieve stress.

The pressure from families, society and ourselves to start a family can be immense, combined with months or years of trying or failed IVF cycles can cause a vicious cycle of stress. If our body’s are caught in a chronic cycle of fight or flight stress response, the body will perceive the environment as hostile and unsafe for reproduction, and so will use less resources to support the processes required for fertility. This goes for men and women (it takes two to tango!). Whatever we can do to alleviate stress on the body, will be beneficial for supporting fertility.

We then combine traditional points that have been used for thousands of years to support fertility and points address any underlying issues with the menstrual cycle.

4. Pregnancy

During pregnancy, the body is undergoing many changes, very quickly. This means it is very common to experience a wide range of symptoms during pregnancy such as morning sickness, pain, lethargy, insomnia, swelling, etc. Unfortunately many usual medications or treatment methods cannot be used during pregnancy, so acupuncture offers safe treatment options for symptomatic relief.

In Chinese medicine, our job is to treat you as the Empress during pregnancy because the happier and healthier you feel, the better your body can support a healthy pregnancy and labour.

Coming up to the due date, we have specific points that have been traditionally used to help promote healthy labour (we avoid these points during the rest of pregnancy). There are also points and treatments that can be tried for breech and posterior positioned babies.  

Acupuncture for labour preparation is typically weekly sessions from 36 weeks of pregnancy.  

5. PostPartum

In traditional Chinese culture, the time after pregnancy is a time to focus solely on recovery and bonding with your new baby. Traditionally you would be waited on hand and food, fed nourishing food, but not allowed to leave the house or see anyone outside of your immediate family or even wash your hair. While some things are no longer appropriate for modern life, the emphasis should still be on recovery and bonding.

Acupuncture has traditional points to help with recovery as well as helping with things that may come up such as breast milk production, pain, mood and energy issues, etc. The hardest part is finding the time for yourself at this stage.

6. Peri / Menopause

Peri-menopause and menopause will affect women in different ways. There are some common symptoms such as hot flushes, dizziness, insomnia, mood changes, etc, but how one woman experiences this transition can be vastly different to another. That is where Chinese medicine pattern differentiation comes into play – our job is to look at the whole picture of your symptoms and come up with a tailored treatment to treat you as a whole person, not just seeking temporary relief from hot flushes.

Depending on the severity of symptoms and other contributing factors, treatment can take some time to build up to a satisfactory level, but there should be signs that the acupuncture (and/or Chinese herbal medicine where appropriate) is helping within the first few weeks of treatment.

We work closely with you to explain the whole process and come up with a treatment plan that suits you and your needs. Throughout treatment, we set up ways for us to track and check on your progress to ensure you continue to find value in your treatments.

Are you  interested in seeing how Acupuncture and TCM can benefit you?

Book in a session with Jennifer in June and receive 10% off your initial visit fee.

Call or go online to book!