Acupuncture is over 3,000 years old, used to prevent, diagnose, and treat disease.
The actual practice of acupuncture includes placing hair-thin needles into the skin on certain points of a meridian. The needles are sterilized to prevent infection and are only one-time use.
Acupuncture points are believed to stimulate the central nervous system. This releases chemicals into the muscles, spinal cord, and brain. These biochemical changes may stimulate the body’s natural healing abilities. They may promote physical and emotional well-being. Conditions that it can be used for:
- Any physical pain – musculoskeletal – arthritis, back pain, muscle weakness
- Digestive issues – any constipation, diarrhea, Gastritis, IBS, etc.
- Emotional – anxiety, depression, insomnia, nervousness
- Eyes, Ear and Throat / Respiratory– sinusitis, sore throat, rhinitis
- Gynecological – menstrual imbalances, infertility
- Neurological – headaches, migraines, seizures, Stroke, Guillen Barre Syndrome, and so much more.
Is acupuncture demonic? Listen in to my theories, perspectives, and opinions, and debunk Christian views on this topic. I am trained in traditional Chinese medicine, including the study of acupuncture. Disclosure: This content is for educational purposes; this is not intended to treat anyone medically. Speak to your doctor for further guidance.
Podcast 43 Transcript
Welcome to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast empowering you to take a whole-person approach to your well-being, spirit, soul, and body. Join me, your host, Dr. Ana Lara, naturopathic doctor, entrepreneur, and a servant of Jesus Christ. We are not just a body, we are spirit and soul. It’s time to integrate medicine and spirituality into our healing. Let’s get started. Welcome back to Physician Heal a Self, the podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Ana Lara. In this episode, we’re going to talk about how acupuncture works. Acupuncture is a therapy that’s been around for over 3000 years. It’s very old and it’s been used to prevent illness, diagnose illness, and treat disease. As a naturopathic doctor, I was fortunate enough that here in the state of Arizona, our curriculum included acupuncture and we were licensed to treat like an acupuncturist. We learned how to diagnose and ing means asking various questions of the person, but also learning how to pulse, diagnose, which we would listen to the radial area of the veins to feel the pulse.
Each pulse point will give us internal information of what each organ is doing. It’s really interesting how the physical body will give us information. The other point of diagnosis that we’ve learned to treat is to look at a person’s tongue. It’s really interesting because each area of the tongue is associated to certain organs, but also, those organs and those systems give us information about what the person is mentally and emotionally processing and what they’re experiencing. Oftentimes, if I look at a person’s tongue and they have tongue teeth marks at the sides of their tongue, I know that that person’s been thinking a lot, worrying a lot, just mentally processing things a lot. I’ll ask them, Have you been thinking a lot or worrying a lot? And they’re like, yeah. There are certain parts of the legs that pertain to that particular organ, which is the stomach and the spleen.
I’ll go and push on a certain point, and it’s really painful. So when we know that a point is painful, it’s typically because there’s a deficiency in that system. I want to explain not just the fact that we’re putting this hair-thin needle into the skin in a certain part of the body. It is a whole philosophy in theory. I know that in Christianity, I’ve heard it’s like a 50-50; some don’t care, they’re okay with it. There are some people that are like, oh, this is not Christian-like you shouldn’t do this because it comes from Eastern philosophies and that’s not God-like. I want to remind you that our Bible or teachings come from Middle Eastern areas, and so it’s not from this country, just like acupuncture is not from this country. I mean, it’s very interesting how the Chinese and a lot of other Asian cultures were able to understand the body and how it functions.
This is how they understood it, and they gave it these names in terms. But now, in science, I can tell you that when we look at these meridians, so these meridians or points of the body that are associated to a certain organ, I can tell you that these meridian lines are consistently in line with our nervous system. For example, and I’ll tell you this, the nerves, the arteries and veins run together in our body. That’s how we learn anatomy in school; if you learn to identify a vein, you can locate the artery and also the nerve in that area, they’re all run together. This is why I’m showing off to those who are listening and not watching the arm. The thumb part of the arm is referred to as the radial aspect of the arm. In the forearm, we have an artery, a vein and a nerve.
Right along that is the lung meridian. Interestingly, the lung meridian is right along the nerve that innervates through this area. We know that the nerves are right there, and most likely, what they were treating was the nervous system, which is why it helps mental, emotional, and physical ailments. It is a very complex system. It takes years to understand the theories and treatment, all the meridians, all the acupuncture points. I promise you it’s not voodoo. It’s not. People think that by inserting a needle in the body, you have a little voodoo doll. No, that’s not what it is, guys. It’s really working on the nervous system. These needles, they’re sterilized. You can only use them one time. They’re sterilized to prevent infection. We typically clean the area and insert this really fine, thin needle. Sometimes, people don’t even feel anything; they don’t feel a poke.
Sometimes, people feel like an electrical shock of energy is moving up that meridian point, and that’s exactly what I’m referring to; it is part of the nervous system. It’s associated with those nerves. So if they feel it, I always tell my patients that if they feel an electrical shooting energy up their leg or arm or wherever it’s going, I say that’s a good thing. That means that there was a blockage somewhere in that meridian point and it cleared up that channel. Now, proper flow of information through the nerves can go to that area. And so I always explain to people who don’t understand acupuncture or think it’s weird, our body, God designed it in such a beautiful way and very, very complex that I truly believe we have yet to understand how it fully functions fully. There are so many things that we still have to discover and understand, like I said, how it works.
But our brain is the main computer, and from there, we have the spinal cord and nerves that exit through each area, sending information to organs and muscles, and so forth. This is the intelligent part of the physical body. It is the nervous system. It’s like electrical information that it’s sending. If there’s impingement or an area that’s restricted, the rest of the body or the organs are not going to receive the information. Sometimes our mental state of mind, what we’re constantly thinking and doing or what we’re physically doing or emotionally what we’re doing, it changes the electrical output of this nervous system. So it’s similar to, for example, this microphone that is right in front of me is powered up through an electrical cord. There are cords here and it’s plugged into an outlet. It’s receiving power from that electrical outlet.
That electrical outlet is not just magically receiving energy through there; it’s receiving it from somewhere else. It could be a circuit box outside of here, that box that’s sending it power from a greater source, it minimizes it to send it to this microphone so it doesn’t explode in my face. It’s the same for the camera, the same for everything else. But that power that this box is receiving is from a greater source, that’s from the streets, all the power lines that are sending the power, and the energy down; it’s being from a greater source. Then when you have the power plants, right, power plants are transferring that kind of energy, that’s high energy. It’s reducing it to a smaller form so that it makes it into your house so they can power up your TV and all your electronics. That same system that humans created, God created within us.
Isn’t that amazing? The brain, which is our power plant, sends energy through the spinal cord and into our nerves, and then through smaller nerves, it innervates through our hands. That may be allowing me to move my hands. It’s allowing me to speak. It allows me to move. It’s our nervous system. I often tell people the benefit of exercising is not to gain muscle. It’s for your nervous system. You’re giving your nervous system the ability to execute this power so that it keeps your brain healthy, younger, and vital. That’s the physical structure we’re working with. So when I refer to acupuncture, it’s like I’m an electrician and I’m going through your house and finding weakness. It’s not like some hocus pocus magic that I’m figuring out. It’s by you. The person tells me that they’re experiencing the pulses in their tongue.
Let me know. These areas are deficient, but they work. It’s 3000 years old. It’s the most effective, safe and effective therapy out there in the world that doesn’t cause harm. I actually treated people who, through COVID, couldn’t receive IVs because they were on either dialysis and so fluid, excess fluids and certain vitamins were too much for the kidney. I did acupuncture on them and I did go online and looked at what other Asian countries they were posting their protocols online. Through my own thought process in observing the patients, I’m like, we got to work on the lung meridians and so forth, help the lungs. Let me tell you, the people who did just acupuncture, no vitamins, no treatments, no nothing else. Not only did they recover faster, they seem more vital after. I’m talking about I was doing acupuncture on a daily basis, and three, four days they were done.
They were over the illness and they are people because of their chronic states of disease. Had I not done the acupuncture, they could have ended up in a hospital or worse. So that’s what acupuncture is. It helps to stimulate the nervous system. It releases chemicals into the muscle, into the spinal cord in the brain. These biochemical changes do not stimulate the body’s natural healing abilities. Now, the body’s natural healing abilities are what God designed our bodies to do, to be able to heal and repair themselves. When we came across pathogens, when we came across injuries, it’s able to heal itself. If I cut my finger by accident with paper or a knife, I don’t need to tell it what to do. My body will naturally stop the bleeding and will start to heal and repair that area. Right now, my job is to keep the wound clean so it doesn’t get infected, but the body has its own natural built-in healing mechanisms to heal.
So acupuncture is going to promote the physical healing, and like I said, mentally and emotionally, it too, because oftentimes what we find through acupuncture is that a lot of the disease states is because this person’s overthinking or they’re thinking the wrong thoughts. They have strong emotions. The organ systems that we know are, for example, the liver. If you’re angry and frustrated and resentful, that becomes bitterness. You can have problems with your liver, you can have problems with the gallbladder physically, but also there’ll be signs and symptoms in your eyes and in your face and other symptoms that you’ll present because you have a lot of anger and it physically will manifest that way. The kidneys tend to be impacted by fear. During COVID-19, a lot of people had a lot of fear so kidney health is really important.
They tend to, like I said, low back pain. Oftentimes, it’s because of fear, it’s instability, being able to provide for your wellbeing financially or so forth. So fear impacts our low back, which our kidneys are in that area. You have all these different systems. For example, the emotions that affect the lungs are grief and sadness; they are unexpressed emotions, I should say. It’s emotions that have not been healthy, expressed in a healthy way, and you just stay stuck in your body and it starts to impact these organs. We know that the human body has over 2000 acupuncture points. A lot of them in the head. I’ll teach you one the very top of your head if it’s parallel to if you look at your ears and go straight up to your head. That’s a really good point. If you’re having difficulty concentrating, if someone’s about to pass out and lose consciousness, that’s a good point.
You can push on it. You can tap on it. It’ll help to bring consciousness to the brain, right? It’s stimulating the brain. There’s another point right above the lip in that little dip above your lip that if you push on that, if someone is about to pass out and you push that point and stimulate it will bring him back to consciousness. There are many different points. There’s the one between the thumb and the index finger in that little dip area. That’s the command point to the head. If you have a headache and you push on that, that’s a natural way. You just got to push really deep, though. Mine is tan right now, and I don’t have a headache. But if you’re thinking a lot, you have a headache. If you push on that point really hard, the most painful out of the two is a side that usually the headache is on.
If you push on that and stimulate it, it’ll help relieve some of that pain. These are different ways that I find that it’s very unfortunate that some people may be misled or misinformed or don’t understand how acupuncture works. They might think it’s voodoo or something, whatever they’ve been taught, and they might be missing out on a really great therapy that can help them physically, mentally, and emotionally. It’s not to say that we make this like God. I think that’s where the misconception comes. Anything that we replace God with, that we idolize, can be anything. Honestly. And this is not to be mean because I work with so many different people, but in the Christian community, coffee is like a big drug for them. If I tell most Christians, I need you to stop drinking coffee because it’s really hurting your health, they freak out.
That, to me, is not healthy. When you become dependent on a substance, anything that idolizes that substance, you’re relying on that. So you’re using, in Chinese medicine, we call that artificial energy, coffee, energy drinks, things that stimulate you. They’re artificial energy. That’s sinful in itself. I can say, well, don’t you believe in God’s power, healing power, and holy spirit energy? That’s the energy you should have. But if we want to live holistic, holy lives, then we need to be, have integrity in how we live life, and we need to be responsible. It’s not to say you can’t enjoy coffee, but I have seen some people who start their day with two or three cups of coffee, and they’re doing that throughout the day. And this is super bad for your adrenal glands. It’s not good for your brain. There was a study recently that I saw where they used before-and-after CT scans of the brain.
They did a CT scan before and gave the person four ounces of coffee, and then they did the CT scan again, and they showed a reduction of blood flow to the brain. So you might have physical energy, but what is it doing to your brain? Now, this makes sense why people with a DHD benefit from caffeine and slowing their nervous system down, slowing the blood flow to the brain. These are not healthy outlets either. I really want you to understand how the meridians and the nerves are electrical, neuronal pathways in the body. It’s the nervous system. Yes, there’s terminology that we’ve been trained in, like the yin and the yang and chi, which is the vocabulary they use. I can say that qi, which is energy, is our spirit. It’s spiritual energy. The yin and yang. I see this in our hormones. Why do they use them? Because men and women have the same hormones.
But the difference is men have a lot of testosterone. They have a little bit of estrogen and progesterone. Women have a lot of estrogen and progesterone and just a little bit of testosterone. Just to give you an idea of what testosterone looks like in a woman and a man, a man will make in a healthy, optimal male, they’ll make between 700 and 900 units of testosterone where women, we just need to be between like five and 40, 44, and we’re good. That’s a huge difference. That’s where I see the yang and the young, which is that men and women are built a little differently, though we’re human. That impacts our health. Obviously different. Like I said, we diagnose based on symptoms during the pulse diagnosis. What are some of the conditions that can be helpful?
I have seen great results for physical pain, anything that’s musculoskeletal, arthritis, back pain, muscle weakness, things like that. I had a young man who couldn’t walk, was coming in in a wheelchair, and we were doing acupuncture every week. Then he’s coming in with crutches, and then we’re doing acupuncture every week, and all of a sudden he’s walking in without no assistance. That’s all the nerve working on the nervous system to vitalize these organs that have been weakened. This is why it would be a great disservice for people to not really understand how this works and be able to optimize it. But then you can work on things like digestive issues. There are great points for constipation, diarrhea, IB, s, anything that’s digestive, even nausea and vomiting. If there’s emotional stuff like anxiety and depression, there’s a lot of points in our ears that help us to regulate our nervous system.
Insomnia, nervousness. There’s anything that’s respiratory, sore throats, runny nose, eyes, ears, throat type of things. There are gynecological benefits to doing acupuncture for women with irregularities or imbalances in their menstrual cycle. This helps to restore and tify those organs. Then women with infertility, there are a lot of points that we use to stimulate the body to give those organs the vitality to help with fertility, A lot of neurological stuff. One of the most amazing things I’ve seen is that I had a 9-year-old child in my office, which is always heartbreaking. She had developed Guillame Bere syndrome after she received a flu vaccine, which is a very common side effect of it. She had the left side of her face was just droopy. There was no neurological response to that. So we did a few acupuncture points just for her to be comfortable, and then we did more.
Then she was able to smile and she was able to regain all of that in a very short time, safe, effective, quick. She was done with that. So people who’ve had seizures, headaches, strokes, it’s a really great therapy for that. That’s what acupuncture is for. There are so many other conditions, by the way, that we can use acupuncture for. You know what? I would rather people do acupuncture than go on narcotic drugs that are having a negative effect on organ systems or are causing addiction problems. This is a great natural, safe substitute to do it. Another quick thing I wanted to share. What’s interesting is that I don’t think it’s unique to China because in 2016, I was able to visit the country of Belize, and I was out there with the Mayan people in the jungles. It was beautiful. By the way, if you’ve never been there, you should go.
I was training on different Mayan abdominal massages that I also do in my office. One of the things that the woman was teaching us was, oh, you want to stimulate this point on the leg and so forth. That’s an acupuncture point. That acupuncture point is actually on point, all puns intended, because that point was specifically to stimulate the uterus to restore the right organ. And so I started to notice that she was exactly on point with the point that was associated to the organ and the function of that. They don’t call it acupuncture, they just call it massage. So you can massage these areas. A lot of massage therapists are massaging these same meridians. They don’t call them meridians. So it’s like you call it tomato, we call it tomato, whatever. But acupuncture has its language because it’s so old.
But I believe that other cultures around the world were aware of the body mechanics and how the body was designed. So I found that very interesting. They were also aware of cupping. They didn’t call it cupping, they called it something else. That’s another therapy that is used in a lot of the traditional Chinese medicine. Hey, I just wanted to speak a little bit about what acupuncture is. How does it work? If it’s not voodoo, it’s not. Again, if you’re Christian, it’s safe to do, but you know what? To each their own. If you feel this is not for you, it’s not for you, but it is a legitimate medical treatment. And it does. I separate any spiritual stuff out of this because it’s really physical; it’s mental and emotional stuff that come up through this therapy. So if you’re interested in maybe receiving some acupuncture, hey, call my office.
We’ll set you up with an acupuncture session. It’s very relaxing. Believe it or not. People fall asleep with needles on their bodies. Hard to believe until you actually do it yourself and experience that. But hey, if you have any questions, reach out to my office. You can visit my website for more information on getting some acupuncture for yourself. Until next time, be blessed. Thank you for listening to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please like, share and subscribe, help this message, reach more people who may need to hear it. Leave your comments. I want to know what you think. If you’re interested in learning more about Raices, visit our website. Until next time, be blessed.