Healing Your Gut With Acupuncture

Your gut, along with everything in life, relies on balance. 

You may have heard of something called the brain-gut connection… According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, “hidden in the walls of the digestive system, this ‘brain in your gut’ is revolutionizing medicine’s understanding of the links between digestion, mood, health and even the way you think.” 

In short, an unbalanced gut can lead to a multitude of non-gut-related symptoms. 

So, where does acupuncture come in? 

It wasn’t until recently, the last 10 years or so, that modern medicine confirmed our gastrointestinal tract is in fact, our second brain. This discovery is drastically changing the way the body and its many functions are viewed and even healed.

Bringing it back to acupuncture, Johns Hopkins Medicine explains the following: Traditional Chinese medicine practitioners believe the human body has more than 2,000 acupuncture points connected by pathways or meridians. These pathways create an energy flow (Qi, pronounced "chee") through the body that is responsible for overall health. Disruption of the energy flow can cause disease. By applying acupuncture to certain points, it is thought to improve the flow of Qi, thereby improving health.

Each meridian corresponds to an organ inside the body, and each acupressure point is named after its location along the meridian or by the action it stimulates in the body. You can get a sense of the complexity of these pathways by checking out The Acupuncture Atlas.

Acupuncture points are believed to stimulate the central nervous system.

This, in turn, releases chemicals into the muscles, spinal cord, and brain. These biochemical changes may stimulate the body's natural healing abilities and, in turn, help to restore balance. 

Restoring Balance

As with balance in our external surrounding life, there’s a purpose to our balance internally. One benefit (among many) is that acupuncture is a very useful way to stimulate organs to react more appropriately to the things we put them through; among those things are the food we consume and activities we partake in.

For thousands of years, Chinese medicine and conventional Western medicine have appeared to be two unrelated and uncompromising paradigms. In our modern day, we may be seeing light at the end of the tunnel by using advanced technology to understand ancient healing methods, and this includes the benefits of acupuncture. 

The National Library of Medicine reports that: Western medicine deals with causative agents of disease entities and specific treatments, while Chinese medicine adopts a holistic approach, with the aim of maintaining health by restoring the balance of body functions.

Enter acupuncture to heal your gut…

Acupuncture helps with digestion and healing your gut because it treats the person holistically, meaning all parts are considered when treatment is rendered. There is no compartmentalizing as in Western medicine. 

I would like to preface this by saying, acupuncture ALONE will not be the cure-all, end-all to your chronic gut issues. Healing the gut takes a lot of work on your own, but acupuncture is a great adjunctive therapy to help along the way.

We know a lot more these days than we ever have before, and we have the ability to make good and healthy choices, choices that can help us maintain or even heal our way to a healthy gut!

If you have questions about how our team at Awaken Now be a part of this journey, email us today.

And don’t forget to check out our Let It Cleanse Program a five-week program focusing on purifying the body of toxins accumulated in the liver and digestive system due to bad eating habits and external pollutants. Click HERE to chat today!