Condition

Reduce Stress & Anxiety

In today’s day-to-day life, we have a lot of demands on our time - work, errands, getting children to school, family, friends, cold callers, accidents, etc - all which utilise our fight-or-flight sympathetic nervous system. This can create stress, depression, and/or anxiety. YUE Clinic have experience in helping reduce all these conditions.

Acupuncture is based on the principles of traditional Chinese medicine, which recognizes the importance of maintaining balance and harmony in the body. 

By stimulating specific points on the body, it promotes relaxation and balance in the body's energy, which increases positive hormone function, such as serotonin and epinephrine. In turn it decreases our main ‘stress’ hormone, cortisol. 

According to Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM):

Depression can be described as a stagnation of energy. 

  • The stagnation could create an imbalance leading to symptoms like difficulty concentrating, melancholy, irritability, exhaustion, and a lack of motivation. 
  • Herbs and acupuncture treat the problem by enhancing the flow of energy, harmonising the organs systems, and establishing homeostasis. 
  • These ideally enable a person to feel more tranquil and better able to handle stress. The points on the scalp and along the spine are used quite frequently in treating depression.

Anxiety can be described as excessive energy, also known as heat. 

  • This can cause insomnia, racing thoughts, and excessive worrying. Acupuncture is used to redistribute the patient’s excessive energy. 
  • Herbs also could be used to clear heat and act a body tonic to rebalance the body.

Recent Studies point to the effectiveness of TCM treatments.

  • An increasing number of studies show the benefits of acupuncture in reducing stress, depression/or anxiety
  • For example, electroacupuncture has been shown to promote relaxation and balance in the body,  energy, by increasing positive hormone function, enkephalin, beta-endorphin and endomorphin, and dynorphin  .

Acupuncture also activates distinct brain regions in different kinds of diseases caused by imbalance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic activities, but also modulates adaptive neurotransmitter in related brain regions to alleviate autonomic response 2.

In “ACUPUNCTURE: REVIEW AND ANALYSIS OF REPORTS ON CONTROLLED CLINICAL TRIALS” 3 published by World Health Organization: “The effect of acupuncture on depression (including depressive neurosis and depression following stroke) has been documented repeatedly in controlled studies Acupuncture is comparable with amitriptyline in the treatment of depression but has fewer side-effects.”

Study & Research References: 

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15135942/

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3677642/

3. https://chiro.org/acupuncture/FULL/Acupuncture_WHO_2003.pdf