How Acupuncture Can Treat Facial Paralysis: Acupuncture for Bell’s Palsy

What is Bell’s Palsy?

Bell’s palsy is a condition where suddenly one side of your face doesn’t move. It’s not from a stroke or a brain bleed. What’s happening is the main motor neuron that supplies the muscle to the face, the facial nerve, gets impinged.

The facial nerve comes out of a small hole in the skull, just below your ear. If you get an ear infection, a head cold or even if it’s cold outside and the wind is blowing on one side more – anything making the tissue in that area get inflamed – that inflammation will cause surrounding tissue to press on the facial nerve. And that’s why the muscles stop moving.

Western Medicine Bell’s Palsy Treatment

The Western treatment for Bell’s palsy is: “Let’s wait a few days and see if the inflammation goes down on its own.” If this doesn’t work, the next option is often to give corticosteroids, which turns off the body’s inflammation response.

However, acupuncture has such a good track record with treating Bell’s palsy that sometimes an ER physician or a neurologist, instead of prescribing corticosteroids, will say, “You should go get some acupuncture.”

Chinese Medicine Bell’s Palsy Treatment

The eastern treatment for Bell’s palsy is to put small acupuncture needles in around the area and apply techniques that encourage blood flow. This stimulate the clearing of fluids, moving out to bad inflammation and allowing in the “good stuff” your body needs for self-healing.

There is also acupuncture treatment applied to the muscles of the patient’s face. This stimulates the muscles to “wake up” and start functioning normally again.

There are good Chinese herbs for Bell’s palsy too. There’s even an herbal formula that works specifically for this condition, and therefore is probably a little better than corticosteroid, which turns off the body’s whole inflammation response in general.

If you or someone has got the Bell’s palsy, please contact us for consultation to see if we can create a treatment plan that can help.

Who is Dr. Perez?

Dr. Dan Perez is both a Western-trained physician and a graduate of the AOMA Graduate School of Integrative Medicine. Based in Austin, Texas, AOMA is recognized as one of the leading schools in Chinese Medicine. Being both an expert in Western medicine and Chinese medicine, Dr. Perez offers his patients natural, minimally invasive and integrative medical options for treating a variety of chronic medical conditions.

Article Sources:

Research trends of acupuncture therapy on facial paralysis in a decade spanning 2013–2023: A bibliometric analysis, Complementary Therapies in Medicine, December 2023

Early intervention with acupuncture improves the outcome of patients with Bell’s palsy: A propensity score-matching analysis, Frontiers in Neurology, September 2022

Chinese Acupuncture in Treatment of Bell’s Palsy Clinical Study, Open Access Library Journal, June 2017