Corrective Care Vs Symptomatic Care With Acupuncture

When trying acupuncture and Chinese medicine for help with a specific issue like pain, headaches, insomnia, a hormonal imbalance, or whatever, it’s important to be clear on what you want out of it.

Are you just looking for some symptomatic relief to help get you through? Or are you after something more corrective and long lasting?

There’s nothing wrong with having a couple of acupuncture sessions for symptomatic relief from something that’s giving you a bit of trouble. Sometimes some short term relief is all you need to get back on the right track, especially if it’s a recent acute issue.

However, for more chronic conditions that have developed over a long period of time, you’re probably looking for a more long term solution. Corrective care is where we try to figure out how the body’s natural physiology has become impaired and work at restoring healthy circulation and vitality. Ideally we get you to a point where you feel better and no longer need the acupuncture. This typically doesn’t happen overnight.

We can think of it in gardening terms (because really the body is like an ecosystem and your acupuncturist is like a gardener): Your garden has become overgrown in some areas with weeds.

The symptomatic approach would be to just pull out the weeds or use a chemical weed killer. Pulling out the weeds will help initially, but the weeds will typically regrow. Using weed killer will also get rid of the weeds and suppress them reemerging if you keep using it, but there are going to be other hidden damaging impacts on the health of the plants, soil and ourselves.

A corrective care approach would be to remove the weeds but also address soil conditions that may have created an ideal environment for the weeds to grow. It may also mean planting more or different varieties of other plants. By creating an environment less hospitable to opportunistic weeds popping up, they will be much more easily managed into the future.

These changes will take more time and effort, but at the end you’ll have a much healthier and more robust garden (body) for it.

If you’re looking for acupuncture in Bondi Junction Sydney to help with symptomatic relief or would like a more corrective approach, you can book online here or contact us here with any questions.