Acupuncture For Fatigue

Let’s talk about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

Here is another opportunity to demonstrate the benefit of Chinese medicine’s alternate view and approach to health and the human body.

Western Medicine and Chronic Fatigue

In a western medical sense Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, or Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, is marked by longstanding, somewhat debilitating chronic fatigue of no clear cause.

Investigations might point towards neurological, immunological, postviral, or infectious causes. But in the end they’re just testing you for all the things they know can cause this much, or this long of, fatigue. Without finding anything, you end up with basically diagnosis of exclusion.

If they don’t know what’s causing the chronic fatigue, it can sometimes be hard to do something curative. You can do symptom control, at best, assuming there’s even anything for it.

Eastern Medicine View of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

A Chinese medical diagnosis works a little differently, with the symptom-pattern diagnosis – start on the outside and work your way in.

Fatigue is qi deficiency. One or two symptoms more, and you can start to narrow that down to, say, lung qi or a kidney qi deficiency. Even at this point, you now have enough information to start treating these patients. You give them a broad, general lung or kidney qi tonifying needle protocol, herbs, and a qigong routine and they’ll start to get better.

Some things will get better and some things won’t. What doesn’t get better and why? That’s potentially important diagnostic information. And using that, you can start to figure out something a little more specific than simply qi deficiency. You can work with these patients for a bit and give them a lot of good benefit, despite the fact that in the end you never really figured out, in a modern western medical sense, what actually was the thing that started it all.

An Advantage of Traditional Chinese Medicine

This comes up a bit here, comparing eastern and western medical diagnoses. By its nature of diagnosis, there are some things that are going to be difficult to nail down with western medicine.

It helps to take a second look from a different angle. Chinese medicine gives you a clue, something to go on that you can start using to work with these patients and help them out.

Learn How Chinese Medicine Can Help

If you have chronic fatigue syndrome, or another condition that is difficult to work out in western medicine, come check us out and see what Chinese medicine has to offer.

Article Sources:

Acupuncture for Chronic Fatigue, Medical Acupuncture, February 2014

Acupuncture for chronic fatigue syndrome and idiopathic chronic fatigue: a multicenter, nonblinded, randomized controlled trial, Trials, July 2015

Acupuncture Treatment for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Translational Acupuncture Research, May 2019

Qigong exercise for chronic fatigue syndrome, International Review of Neurobiology, Volume 147, 2019