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    Managing Pain: And Other Medically Proven Uses of Acupuncture
    Managing Pain: And Other Medically Proven Uses of Acupuncture
    Managing Pain: And Other Medically Proven Uses of Acupuncture
    Ebook137 pages1 hour

    Managing Pain: And Other Medically Proven Uses of Acupuncture

    By Richard Halvorsen

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    About this ebook

    Chronic pain is associated with a host of conditions for which traditional medicine has no cure. Increasingly, medical practitioners look to acupuncture to manage pain and other conditions - with over 1 million people in the UK being helped every year, and an estimated 20 million in the USA. This readable, practical and comprehensive guide brings together all acupuncture treatments as well as the latest clinical medical research into their effectiveness. In addition, the author has included observations from his own practice. Easy-to-understand ratings make clear where acupuncture is most likely to work for you. For the first time, the effectiveness of acupuncture based on Western medical science (muscle knots) and traditional Chinese medicine (energy channels) are considered side by side. Some of the applications discussed apart from chronic pain: insomnia, stress, stopping smoking, losing weight, migraine, infertility, pregnancy conditions, menopause, nausea, irritable bowel syndrome, cancer, irritative bladder, drug addiction.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGibson Square
    Release dateApr 4, 2013
    ISBN9781908096159
    Managing Pain: And Other Medically Proven Uses of Acupuncture
    Author

    Richard Halvorsen

    Dr Richard Halvorsen has been deeply involved in vaccination through his London GP practice. He is also founder of BabyJabs, a child-immunisation service based in London, and has appeared on BBC Breakfast News and Channel 4 News for comment on vaccination issues, as well as written extensively for the media on the subject.

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      Book preview

      Managing Pain - Richard Halvorsen

      paintcover.jpg

      Chronic pain is associated with a host of conditions for which traditional medicine has no cure. Increasingly, medical practitioners look to acupuncture to manage pain and other conditions – with over 1 million people in the UK being helped every year, and an estimated 20 million in the USA.

      This readable, practical and comprehensive guide brings together all acupuncture treatments as well as the latest clinical medical research into their effectiveness. In addition, the author has included observations from his own practice. Easy-to-understand ratings make clear where acupuncture is most likely to work for you.

      For the first time, the effectiveness of acupuncture based on Western medical science (muscle knots) and traditional Chinese medicine (energy channels) are considered side by side.

      Some of the applications discussed apart from chronic pain: insomnia, stress, stopping smoking, losing weight, migraine, infertility, pregnancy conditions, menopause, nausea, irritable bowel syndrome, cancer, irritativebladder, drug addiction.

      Dr Richard Halvorsen has included acupuncture in the course of his practice as a London GP for over 25 years. He is frequently asked for comment on general medical issues by the media.

      MANAGING PAIN

      And Other Medically Proven Uses of Acupuncture

      Dr Richard Halvorsen

      gibson square

      Contents

      Introduction

      Frequently Asked Questions

      1 What Is Acupuncture?

      2 What Are the Treatments?

      3 What Happens during Treatment?

      4 Is Acupuncture Safe?

      5 What Can Acupuncture Treat?

      Managing Pain and Treating Diseases

      6 Musculoskeletal Problems

      7 Headaches & Migraines

      8 Female (Gynaecological) Problems

      9 Conditions Related to Pregnancy

      10 Asthma & Allergic Conditions

      11 Addictions

      12 Bowel Problems

      13 Psychological problems

      14 Cancer

      15 Other Conditions

      16 What Is Acupuncture Unable to Treat?

      Appendices

      I How Do I Find a Good Acupuncturist?

      II Research into Acupuncture

      III Resources

      Introduction

      When I was training to be a doctor in London in the 1980s we were not taught anything about acupuncture. There was no mention of it during my five years of study, except possibly the odd aside by a consultant who mocked a patient for being so silly as to seek some acupuncture before coming round to their senses and seeing a ‘proper doctor’. We were not informed about any of the so-called ‘complementary’ or ‘alternative’ therapies. Acupuncture, along with all the others, was considered unscientific and mysterious – and not something with which serious doctors should be dabbling.

      However, as a medical student, and then a junior hospital doctor, I frequently and repeatedly saw patients suffering from chronic medical conditions for whom our ‘proper’ scientific medicine had little to offer.

      Western medicine did not have all the answers, and I wondered whether other systems of medicine might be able to fill in some of the gaps. Soon after finishing my medical studies I embarked on a two year course in Traditional Chinese Acupuncture at the British College of Acupuncture (which sadly no longer exists) in London.

      Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is based on a completely different system of medicine from the one I had been taught in medical school. I started by trying to relate what I was being taught to what I had learnt at medical school. In TCM there is talk of the kidney, the liver and the heart; at least I knew, or thought I knew, what these were. I assumed a kidney was the same kidney and a liver was the same liver in any system.

      Wrong. In modern medicine the kidneys are seen as organs that filter the blood, preserving the chemical balance of the blood and producing urine. In TCM the kidneys are believed to store the body’s ‘Essence’; amongst other functions they produce marrow and manufacture blood. This is complete nonsense to a Western trained doctor and so six months into my course I was feeling totally confused. Then the penny dropped. I would no longer think of a TCM kidney as being the same thing as a Western medical kidney. I realized that they were completely different concepts, similar only in that they share a common name.

      I no longer believed literally what I was being taught (I knew that the kidneys didn’t really manufacture blood) but saw this way of explaining the body as a template on which to devise a traditional Chinese treatment. The important thing to me, as a clinician, was whether the treatment worked; I was less concerned about the theoretical foundation on which that treatment was based.

      During, and after, my course I was able to see acupuncture being used in practice and saw with my own eyes that it often, though not always, did work and sometimes even relieved people from distressing symptoms that orthodox Western medicine, the one I had studied in medical school, hadn’t been able to help.

      In subsequent years I continued to study both traditional Chinese and Western medical acupuncture in the UK and China. I have also received acupuncture myself for various problems over the years.

      A lot has changed during my time in practice over the last 30 years. In the early years my practice of acupuncture was received, at best, with baffled amusement and, at worst, with strong condemnation. Now thousands of doctors have received training in acupuncture and many use it as part of their daily practice. I receive frequent referrals from both consultants and GPs, something that did not happen not too long ago. Acupuncture is increasingly used by GPs themselves, or provided by other members of the primary health care team, such as physiotherapists or nurses.

      Acupuncture is now one of the most popular of all complementary therapies. Over one million people in Great Britain and nearly two million Australians (over nine per cent of the adult population) use acupuncture every year. Nearly twenty million people in the USA have used acupuncture at one time or another. Though it is still not easy for most people to obtain acupuncture treatment on the NHS, it is widely available privately. But finding an experienced and competent acupuncturist is a minefield as anyone, even with little or no training or qualifications, can legally call themselves an ‘acupuncturist’.

      I set out to make this the first book that looks at acupuncture from both a Western and Chinese perspective, rather than favouring just one of them. I seek to explain our understanding of how acupuncture works, both from a traditional Chinese viewpoint and from a modern Western scientific perspective.

      I have also pulled together

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