If at all possible, I take a shower every morning. Now you may be thinking that my personal bathing habits are a bit too much information but bear with me. Quite apart from any hygiene considerations, I feel much better after a shower. To a large extent that is understandable, particularly if I awake feeling a bit stuffed up. I guess it’s the hot moist air that helps. But there is something else. Even taking account of the difficulty of making objective judgements based on self-observation, I am convinced that having hot jets of water on the back of my neck give me an additional boost in addition to all the usual benefits of a morning shower.
I’ll return to this but first a digression on acupuncture.
A very good friend from university days, Stephen, became a GP although he is now retired. Some years before his retirement he did a course on acupuncture and operated a successful acupuncture clinic as part of his practice. Now, Stephen is a very rational person and I am a bit of a cynic about complementary therapies so I asked him once what it is all about. He replied with two points. If you itch, you scratch. A bit counter-intuitive that. You have an irritation which presumably arises from excessive firing of nerve endings and you cure it by stimulating those nerve endings even more. Second point. The classic acupuncture texts show diagrams with some sort of lines of force and key points (forgive me, I do speak from some ignorance here). If you look at an anatomy textbook, those acupuncture diagrams are very similar to the diagrams of the nervous system of the human body.
So is acupuncture just a way of stimulating nerves? That sounds simple but I guess that knowing which nerves to stimulate is the difficult bit. Stephen also said that you don’t have to do it with needles – simple pressure can work. But needles do seem to be better. Maybe more stimulation or perhaps there is just a bit of psychology as well?
Back to my morning shower. I mentioned this back of the neck effect to Stephen and he said that is one of the key acupuncture points. So have I been giving myself a little acupuncture session every morning?
Tags: acupuncture
November 3, 2008 at 8:32 pm |
All the most powerful acupuncture points are where there are rich concentrations of nerve fibres, and they can be stimulated by pressure, needles, electric currents and even high intensity light ( a laser pointer will work). Squeeze your thumb against your first finger – the muscle forms a mound – press on the apex of that mound against the bone of the finger with your other thumb and you will feel a slightly tender spot. It is a useful acupuncture point for wrist, elbow, shoulder and neck pain.