Many people seek help through acupuncture for nausea because acupuncture restores the body’s balance. To understand how Japanese Acupuncture works for this debilitating state, it is important firstly to realise what causes nausea.
Nausea is a very general term and covers people suffering from an extraordinary range of events. The events can range from morning sickness to food poisoning to a response to chemotherapy.
These are three very extreme examples of nausea and obviously we have the other frequent occurrences such as flu’s, viruses, colds and reactions to different situations such as stress and anxiety and migraine headaches.
All of these scenarios can contribute to, and result in, nausea as being the dominant symptom of the problem.
Acupuncture For Nausea
From an acupuncture perspective, this rejection by the stomach is from too much heat or too much cold and this imbalance forces the contents of the stomach to come up. In the case of nausea the stomach lining and the lining of the intestines can be very irritated as a result of some ulcerous development, continuous stress and anxiety or as a response to medication.
This irritation can cause a gnawing nauseousness – a continual feeling that one wants to be sick or needs to be sick. This feeling is a result of an excessive amount of heat in the stomach.
What we do in traditional acupuncture is that we actually call in our fire brigade. Our fire brigade in Japanese Acupuncture is what we call our Kidney Yin function. This function is the fundamental factor that we use to cool and nourish and lubricate the body in general and the stomach specifically.
The kidney function could be considered the thermostat, the air-conditioning unit, in the body. In Traditional Acupuncture or Oriental Medicine we see the kidney as being able to warm or cool the body.
I guess in a way we have a connection with the Western paradigm through the adrenals and the hormonal system; in Japanese Acupuncture the kidney is what we call the control factor.
So if we heighten what we call the Kidney Yin or cooling function of the body, this will as a result assist in the cooling of the stomach. Alternatively, we can warm up the kidney function which will warm up the stomach.
In either case it will balance the excess amount of cold or heat in the body that is contributing to the feeling of nausea.
I found that, in my 30 years as a practitioner, Japanese Acupuncture can be incredibly effective for a myriad of problems when nausea is a very dominating factor. For example, these acupuncture treatments were used with patients undergoing chemotherapy who came to see me regularly. This helped inexorably to assist these people to get through what is a very, very trying medical procedure and to lessen the severity of their nausea thus making the whole situation more tolerable.
We could equally say the same about how acupuncture has helped pregnant women suffering from extreme nausea which is diabolical and debilitating. It is cruel that someone who is growing another human being should be subjected to what really is a form of torture. Again, I found Japanese Acupuncture to be extraordinarily effective in helping to control this.
We could also include the nausea associated with migraine headaches. Again, migraine headaches and the nausea are about the heat coming up in the body. So, once again traditional acupuncture is very much about balancing the Yin and the Yang, the cold and the hot, in all areas of the body.
Acupuncture for nausea is very effective because of the ability of acupuncture treatments to restore this balance in the body.
