Episode 1: How does acupuncture work? - a podcast by Dr. Maz Roginski (BHSc. Chinese Medicine)

As a doctor of Chinese Medicine, and a scientist interested in both ancient technologies and the latest biomedical research, this is one of the most common questions I'm asked. And it's a great question to kick off this podcast, as at this point in time, not only do we have thousands of years of continuous clinical practice of this modality and many documented clinical studies from those millennia, but we also have literally tens of thousands of research papers published in contemporary scientific journals that discuss the many mechanisms and many pathways through which acupuncture has an effect on the body. Join me as a I answer this question from both an Eastern and a Western perspectiveTranscript
One of the main inspirations behind starting this podcast was the many amazing conversations that I have with my patients in clinic, and the awesome and insightful questions I get asked both in, and outside of, clinic throughout my daily life. One of the most common of these questions is “how does acupuncture work?” This is an important one to answer, as quite often I’ll be having a conversation with someone and they’ll say “oh, I love acupuncture and I’d love my husband / mother / co-worker to get acupuncture as they’d really benefit, but they don’t believe in it”. I find this to be an interesting statement, because acupuncture isn’t a religion - it’s not something that you believe in - it either does or it doesn’t work. And particularly at this point in time, not only do we have 5,000 years of continuous clinical practice of this modality and many documented clinical studies from those millennia, but we also have literally tens of thousands of research papers published in contemporary scientific journals that discuss the many mechanisms and many pathways through which acupuncture has an effect on the body. So, I thought this was a great question to kick of this podcast, as it can be answered on so many levels. There’s the short answer, long answer, the Chinese Medicine answer and the biomedical / scientific / contemporary research answer. So I’d like to get into all of those, but I think the best place to start is with the short answer.So, how does acupuncture work? The short answer is that acupuncture works by supporting the body’s innate healing mechanisms. These healing mechanisms are what allow our bodies to heal from cuts and to mend fractured bones, to bounce back from infections and colds, and even in outlying cases it might be what accounts for spontaneous remissions in serious diseases. We all have these superpowers, and in an ideal world, we’d be returning to a state of dynamic balance (or what we also call homeostasis) in the face of life’s various ups and downs. Say we have too many late nights and lots of stressors, and some dietary changes and maybe exposure to some pollutants and toxins: in an ideal world, our body would be able to recalibrate and return to a state of health. But unfortunately, modern life has quite a hectic pace and quite strong demands on us, so we are not always able to live in accordance with both our internal resources (that’s how much energy we have, our current state of emotion and our biochemical reserves, for example) and living in harmony with our external resources (that’s living in harmony with the outside world: harnessing access to sunlight, fresh air and movement). that’s not necessarily always happening – we might forego movement to sit at a desk 12 hours a day, and then drive home through traffic and get stressed, get stuck in a negative mindloop and then come home and have a fight with someone in our family, and have more stresses about money / mortgage / career / all sorts of concerns. So really, we are living in a constant state of constant stress.
What this does is it overstimulates our sympathetic nervous system. This is a component of our body’s autonomic nervous system that is also termed the “fight or flight” system. This is the response that we get in the face of stre...

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Website of Dr. Maz Roginski (BHSc. Chinese Medicine)