An allergy occurs when the immune system reacts too much to a foreign substance, which could be pollen, food, bug bites, and many others. Typically, most people try to avoid those allergens or just take allergy medicine like antihistamine to prevent the hyperreaction. However, these approaches or treatments do not really remove the cause of health conditions. As a result, many of these drugs cause addiction and other health issues.
No one was born with a perfect balanced body. So, we can use acupuncture to reach this goal by reducing the strong reaction of the body due to allergen. Based on the theory of Traditional Chinese Medicine, breathing and the health of skins is controlled by the lung systems (including lungs, lung meridians, nose, etc.). So, we can needle the acupoints on the lung meridian when there are symptoms of hay fever such as stuffy nose or itchy feeling around the nose. In addition, as other systems such as liver and spleen can affect the lung system due to five element theory, some times we need to needle those meridians too in order to make the body balanced. As a result, for food allergy, we normally needle the acupoints on both liver and lung meridians.
Acupuncture on allergy is very effective clinically. In practice, we will identify the patient’s symptoms based on mucus, sinus, sneezing, the color of the tongue, skin, pulse, tender spots of the face/body, and many other factors to seek the best combination of the acupoints. Usually, in 1-3 treatments, the patient should have significant improvement if the diagnosis is correct.
For more information, regarding how we take care of different pains in real cases. Please check out our posts regarding this topic: https://www.onenessmedical.com/category/allergy/
