Restore Balance to Your Whole System

Chinese medicine is a system built on thinking about the body as 1 complete ecosystem. This approach supports true wellness by addressing interconnected health concerns. Acupuncture is accessing points within this system to signal to the body how to fix the problem and balance the various systems of the body.

Start Sleeping Better and Feeling Balanced

Book your appointment and discover what true wellness feels like.

Insomnia & Cortisol

Insomnia is not only trouble falling asleep. It includes trouble staying asleep; waking frequently through the night, waking up feeling like you haven't slept, or waking and staying up for multiple hours in the middle of the night.



In East Asian medicine, the distinction between these different patterns, allows us to figure out the best method to getting your sleep back on track. We don't treat every version of insomnia with the same acupuncture points and herbal medicine. We figure out where YOUR body is stuck and treat it based on your specific pattern.

After an extended time, even low level stress from "adulting" can lead to short term insomnia becoming a lifelong problem. Many patients consider insomnia to be "just who I am" because they have had it for so long. The good news is, it doesn't have to be!

The Stress Hormone:  Cortisol is supposed to be higher when we wake up to get us ready for our day, and to be lower in the evening to prepare us for bed. It is NOT inherently a bad hormone. However, when thrown off, we end up wired and tired or exhausted and wired. Our bodies don't know how to turn off our "go-mode" to rest!

Acupuncture points for stress relief

Trying to reduce stress can feel so hard to do that it causes us more stress. Thousands of social media posts revolve around how hard life is for millennials, and how-to videos are full of more to-do’s. If you’re searching for ways to lower stress, you’ll be glad to learn that acupuncture is very effective at reducing stress.

Acupuncture uses tiny needles to help the calm central nervous system. It turns down the volume of our subconscious minds screaming “fight” through every part of our bodies. However, there’s no single magic point that does it equally for every person, because stress doesn’t affect everyone the same way. Some get stress migraines. Others crave comfort food to fill the void. Some lose sleep, while others have panicked dreams. 

In Chinese Medicine, stress causes our normal flow to stop or slow down. Flow refers to both energetic flow as well as blood flow. We often see cascading symptoms and health decline if stress is a chronic long term issue, thus, we relieve it with movement of energy and blood. An example of this can be felt when we take a walk with a friend. Whether in person or on the phone, the conversation while physically moving your body can be very softening to our emotional “stuckness” and a habit of walking with a friend is at the top of my recommendations list. 

By taking your pulse, looking at your tongue, and diagnosing, acupuncture can help in more targeted ways by choosing points just for you. During the treatment, patients' breathing often deepens. Oxygen reaching more cells, signals to the body that it is safe. Sleep becomes deeper and muscles start to relax. Following treatments, patients notice less anxiety or panic, reduced blood pressure, and less quick irritable reactions to stressful news at work or with their kids.

Headaches

As we fight to keep up with the demands of modern life, stress often impacts us both mentally and physically. Many people develop frequent or more stubborn headaches due to work stress, social stress, or overall burnout. They range from a tension headache to a full blown migraine with light and sound sensitivity, making it impossible to work, or do anything, besides lay in a dark room.

We work with the information you are able to give us and feel your pulses to determine the Chinese Medicine imbalance happening for your exact case and help to reduce both frequency and severity of headaches.

Acupuncture for headaches

Unlike turning off pain receptors, Chinese Medicine aims to fix the problem causing the headache so that they eventually don’t return again. With this goal, we don’t have one point that is “the” point, but rather a menu of points which are known to help different types of headaches. 

A headache at the base of the skull makes me check the neck muscles and back muscles. There is often tension stored in these muscles that, when released, reduces the occurrence of occipital headaches. Patients often find that massaging the back of the neck with the pads of their fingers can help reduce this tension. With acupuncture, we can needle a couple of points in the muscles that loosen the whole muscle, similarly to pulling one string to undo a complex looking knot in a rope.

A headache at the temples is often accompanied by throbbing. Along with finding out the quality of the headache such as weather it throbs, stabs, or is dull, I also look for whether the discomfort is relieved when being pressed or aggravated when being pressed. If pressure is applied and it feels better, rubbing the temples can help while it is acting up. If pressure makes the headache worse, we tend to needle points at the opposite end of the body in the ankles or feet to conceptually pull away from the headache rather than conceptually pressing on it. One of the acupuncture points to press on at home is at the top of the foot between the bone of leading to the big toe and bone leading to the 2nd toe. Acupuncture needling this area combined with points that help suppress the problem causing the headache, not only helps the current symptom, but also reduces how often the headache returns.

An ache across the front of the face from cheek to cheek. This pressure headache / sinus headache is caused by, well, pressure within the sinuses. Thus the treatment is to reduce the phlegm or opening flow to reduce pressure causing the discomfort.

Pre-Diabetes & Insulin Resistance

Have you ever wondered why you get hangry? Do you go from normal to immediately irritable if you aren't fed in the next 5 minutes? Have you tried a million diets and still feel stuck? You may have insulin resistance. 

Millions of Americans have insulin resistance whether or not their HbA1c blood labwork flags them as "pre-diabetic" or not. Many of us suffer the negative effects of blood sugar dysregulation, just not enough to need medication for it; a matter of more severe (type 2 diabetes) versus less severe (borderline or pre-diabetic). Oddly, even if you are already pre-diabetic, there's a chance your doctor never mentioned it to you. You're currently doing better than the rest of the population and there is no medication for pre-diabetes, but without changes to your nutrition and lifestyle, you can be headed towards diabetes. Changes can reverse the direction of this. 

Symptoms of blood sugar dysregulation & insulin resistance:

• frequently "hangry" or low hunger then ravenously hungry.
• craving carbohydrates, sweets, snacks, or caffeine.
• "tired and wired" feeling
• energy crashes in the afternoon
• weight gain
• bloating
• frequent urination
• "heaviness" sensation
• slow metabolism

Why is diabetes a problem?

One reason high sugar in the blood stream is problematic can be imagined as sweet sticky sugar droplets flowing with your blood cells. Because they are sticky, they attach to various parts as they flow through; your muscles, your lungs, your stomach, your heart, etc. Some of these areas use the sugar droplets, but because there is so much, droplets also stick to areas that need red blood cells or other vitamins and minerals. Instead, they're being clogged up by sugar rather than receiving nutrients. Your body tries to fight the problem, causing inflammation in all areas that are clogged. Because blood flows everywhere, this inflammation happens in many places. Problems start to arise when blood sugar is high so frequently that inflammation never gets the chance to go down. 

What can I do about it?

You can work on your body's blood sugar regulation. You want to minimize blood sugar spikes, which are when the amount of sugar in you blood increases highly then drops. The ideal is to increase times where your blood sugar is in an optimal range and decrease the time when your body needs to use insulin to try to bring the amount of sugar in your blood down to a healthy level. 

Sugar is very addictive. The journey to changing your diet and nutrition can be a hard one, because we are bombarded socially by sweet or carbohydrate heavy foods as well as deliciously unhealthy drinks. Give yourself patience as you navigate how to make changes amongst any social events that come up. It is pivotal to make the changes for your overall long term health, and takes strength to find new ways to cope with stress or to celebrate that don't include unhealthy foods. Acupuncture can help curb the cravings, strengthen digestion, increase metabolism, and reset the brain from addiction, but it takes time and work. 

Cold/Flu Immunity

Immunity, or lack of, can stop our lives without advance notice. If fever takes over or we're stuck in bed congested, sore, and foggy, everything else must take a back seat until we can become ourselves again. If you've lived a life where you get sick more than 3 times a year, it is very possible to strengthen your immunity to avoid this. Getting sick is a part of life, however, there are ways to boost your immune system so that you get sick fewer times per year and for shorter durations.

Chinese Medicine has focused on not getting sick as the root of health for thousands of years. Strengthening the body includes every system, not targeting thousands and thousands of individual parts, but by healing the whole.

Did you know? We eat germs along with our food and this is a natural way for our body to get to know what's in the outside world. Our digestive tract is a pivotal place where we learn what type of defenses to build with our immune system. We also take in germs when we breathe. When our bodies feel threatened by allergens and illnesses, we create barriers like runny nose and congestion. These outer defenses send information to the immune system to create a strong army for anything that passes our outer barriers.