Here I discuss Japanese acupuncture for chronic fatigue syndrome and its efficacy in helping people who are suffering the debilitating effects of this condition.
Just recently a young, very successful business man in his late thirties came into my clinic in Brisbane. He was a highly qualified but highly stressed senior manager in a large organisation.
He took ill with a dose of the flu last August (about 6 months ago). He has never recovered and he finds himself, on a daily basis, struggling with fatigue and exhaustion.
He finds that he has migrating pain in his body that can move from his feet, to his hands, to his neck, to his forehead, elbows, chest and shoulders. This migratory pain is a bit like the “Phantom” – here, there and everywhere.
This young businessman is in a bit of trouble even though he is very successful. I talked to him about how often chronic fatigue syndrome will assail an individual who, if you like, is a perfectionist to some degree. This is why so many elite athletes end up with chronic fatigue syndrome because they are particularly driven and “rest” is not a common part of their vocabulary or their lifestyle.
I think in the 21st century much of this occurs where we’re thinking that three or four hours of sleep is enough. We drive ourselves over 12-18 hour days, which are not uncommon at the top end of business and certainly is the case with the elite athlete with the degree and intensity of the training they undergo.
What can happen is that the athlete or business person picks up a virus and, instead of resting and taking it easy, they maintain their high level of activity because they do not want to “lose ground”. So they fail to help their body recover and garner all the internal forces to form a blockade to fight the virus. From a traditional acupuncture perspective, the virus can then go deeper into the body which makes it a lot more difficult to get rid of and leaves a legacy of aches, pains and overwhelming lethargy.
In my experience, Japanese acupuncture has been incredibly effective in working to assist this type of patient regain better health.
I’ve worked with Olympic athletes and highly stressed, very successful business people in helping them to recover their health and I am pleased to say that in almost all occasions this has been the case.
In Japanese acupuncture we address chronic fatigue syndrome in a unique way. We look at it from an East Asian medicine perspective. From this perspective, chronic fatigue syndrome is what we could term a spleen/pancreas deficiency syndrome.
This means that that the transfer and transformation of nutrients and fluids in the body are compromised. So two things are happening, (1) insufficient energy is being derived from the fuel we take on board and (2) the ability of the body to transport the energy (that has been manufactured) to the extremities of the brain, is impoverished as a result of the body’s predisposition to deal with the presence of the virus deeper in the system.
According to traditional acupuncture physiology, when the virus does drive deeply into the body’s system, this drains the spleen or earth energy – the primary organ/meridian complex responsible for the immune system. Then this knock-on effect leads to the lethargy, the fuzzy head and unclear thinking, the indecisiveness, the general fatigue, the malaise and the aches and pains in the body.
So we call this a spleen/pancreas deficiency in the body and we work with tonifying or strengthening this earth or spleen aspect of the meridian organ system while dealing with the areas where there is a relatively excess amount of energy, usually somewhere where there is pain and discomfort.
Our approach in using Japanese acupuncture for chronic fatigue syndrome is very different to the Western approach but clinically it has proven to be very effective.
If you would like to watch my video on this topic – please click HERE!
