ACUPUNCTURE 101 (Q&A)

The practice of Acupuncture has been around over 3000 years. Tune in to understand how tiny needles can potentially make a huge difference in your health. Our guest Dr Tenisha Dandridge helps to answer all of your questions. Join Dr. Mel and the crew for another great show.

Question: This is such a fascinating topic. Can you just start off by telling us what is acupuncture?

Dr. Tanisha Dandridge: Acupuncture is one tool in the toolkit of traditional east Asian medicine. It is the insertion of a very fine, very thin fill form needle. That means that the needle is solid and not hollow like a hypodermic needle. And you insert this very thin, a fine needle into an acupuncture point in order to get the body to elicit healing changes within itself. So that’s it in a nutshell. In order to practice acupuncture in the United States, it requires a minimum of a master’s degree. It is actually one of the heaviest weighted master’s degree program in this country. So we have a very extensive education that tells us where needles go, how to find them and how to combine points in order to get the best chances of bringing the body back into balance.

Question: Tell us about what are some of the things that can be treated with acupuncture.

Dr. Tanisha Dandridge: Acupuncture’s good for everything that isn’t emergency medicine. If it’s cut off, falling off, falling apart, suddenly not working like heart attack, strokes, don’t call your acupuncturist. But for anything that’s stable, like irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn’s, nausea, constipation, diarrhea, all digestive complaints, anything that’s pain, whatever is causing the pain, whatever the etiology. So headaches, migraines from or pains from car accidents are good for acupuncture. I have treated people who are in labor because their labor sucks and it either needs to speed up or it hurts really bad. And they wanna modulate the pain that they’re experiencing. I treat internal medicine. So I treat hypertension. I treat diabetes. I have clients who have organ failure and acupuncture is keeping them around. There’s a specialty of acupuncture for just about anything, including, a guy who’s famous for doing eye acupuncture. If you have a detached retina or glaucoma or something like that. And there are people who specialize in women’s health, there are people who specialize in men’s health. There are people who specialize in pediatrics.There is no limit to this medicine – unless it’s emergency room medicine, please go to the emergency room.

Question: When somebody comes to visit an acupuncturist, what should they expect?

Dr. Tanisha Dandridge: You should expect to have to fill out a health history questionnaire, the same way that you would for any other medical provider you should wear loose, comfortable clothing. You should go hydrated and with a full belly. And the reason for that is, is that acupuncture kind of taps into your metabolism. So you will burn through your glucose reserves. If you go on an empty stomach, you’ll end up getting up feeling kind of lightheaded or slightly off, because your glucose levels will have plummeted over the course of the treatment. You should expect someone to take a look at your tongue, maybe not quite so much in COVID these days, you should expect someone to feel your pulse on both sides, and then you can expect them to kind of loosely explain what’s going on in terms of east Asian medicine. And then there’s an application of the needles. You will have anywhere from 10 to 30, it just kind of depends on your practitioner. Some people don’t do more than 10. Some people will throw as many of them in there as the kitchen sink. Typically you rest with the needles in, for 20 to 30 minutes, again, each practitioner and each style of acupuncture’s a little different. Then there is the removal of the needles. Sometimes there’s the application of a particular type of heat lamp. It’s called a TDP lamp. It is infrared heat. Sometimes there’s the burning of an herb over acupuncture points. That’s called moxibustion.

To learn more about acupuncture and the healing properties it can elicit, click the link.