Why I Don’t Treat Symptoms
When asked what I treat in my practice, I always find myself struggling to answer this in wholeness. What I have found myself leaning on is saying something like I don’t treat symptoms, I treat the person in the room with me. We all have experienced a variety of symptoms in our lives, many of us have had a headache, pain from our periods, heartache from a breakup, a strained rotator cuff, the list goes on. In western medicine, and western society, we want to cover up these symptoms, the pain, the discomfort, the difficulty that comes with it. But that’s exactly where we went wrong.
Covering these symptoms just makes them scream louder the next way that they show up. Numbing our pain leads to numbing of all our other experiences. And eventually what that can look like is exhaustion from keeping all the pain underneath the surface, a continuous stack of symptoms that don’t seem to match a diagnosis, frustration from doctor visits saying that your lab work looks fine but knowing that indeed nothing is fine. The feeling that everything seems dulled, and that you are just coping your way through each day.
That’s where 5 Element Acupuncture comes in, and what my focus has been on- in treating people who are at the end of a road. When they can’t continue to go on the way things have been—with that physical pain, the emotional exhaustion, the fatigue, you name it. In these sessions, we create space in the body for transformations to happen, which can allow for stuck energy to release. The results from this generally look like reduced physical pain, more energy in the body and mind, and a feeling of ease and of return to self.
I often see that my patients are able to have more clarity and inspiration in their life when getting acupuncture. After the pain and the dullness begins to dissipate, a new road starts to become apparent. This can look like new direction in life, whether that be in relationships with others, with self, with their work, or simply in new ways of enjoying life. This is my life’s work—to help others find a new way of living, one that is with less pain, more ease, and in alignment with their true self.
