How Acupuncture Works for Depression

One of the top 10 complaints we tend to see in private practice as an acupuncturist or Chinese medicine doctor is depression and it makes you think, well, if depression is such a strong chemical imbalance, how can sticking a couple needles in someone actually fix that? Well, as you'll soon see, acupuncture works incredibly well for depression and anxiety. Now, in this video, I want to share a few research points as well as the patterns we tend to look for when treating someone for depression. Hey guys, I'm Alex Hine, author of the book Master the Day and a current doctoral student in traditional or classical Chinese medicine. I've put together a free guide on five daily habits you can start doing today to add 10 years to your life and feel a million times better with traditional Chinese medicine. It's the first link in the description box there, so click it, go download it, we'll get back to the video now. So I want to share a few studies on using acupuncture alone for depression and what the researchers found. Now in one 2013 study in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, researchers found that electroacupuncture, so this is acupuncture where they're connecting electrodes and it's gentle stimulation, was actually just as effective as Prozac in easing depression symptoms. That was kind of crazy. Let's check out another study here. Now this second study was done and researchers wanted to see the effect of acupuncture on sexual dysfunction, which again was tested because it's a very common side effect of being on antidepressants. Now what they found was that both men and women showed noticeable and significant improvement after 12 weeks of acupuncture alone treatment. Another study was done and it found that acupuncture may even help clinical treatments working better as effectively as counseling. So in terms of a complementary plan to help the patient heal and recover, help the person, acupuncture worked as good as or better than counseling, which is kind of crazy. So that's a little bit of the research side, but what are the patterns that a Chinese medicine doctor or acupuncturist may be looking for to treat regarding depression? So there's typically five or six kind of textbook patterns and of course practice is different than the textbook, but we tend to see some variation on the following patterns here. The first one is what's called a liver pattern. So in the liver pattern, the person may have symptoms like lack of motivation, there's distension or pain in the chest or underneath the ribs, issues associated with more emotional changes, acid reflux, burping, poor appetite, nausea, irregular bowel movements, changes in menstruation. The next pattern is called a liver heat or a liver fire pattern. And what this is involved in is irritability, a bitter taste in the mouth, more acid regurgitation, constipation, headaches, red eyes, and more of a red tongue with a yellow coat. The third pattern is what's called a qi or a phlegm stagnation pattern. And what we tend to see here is depression associated with feeling like there's a knot in the throat, a stifled or stuffy feeling in the chest, and more symptoms of mucus or saliva and things like that. The next pattern we tend to see is what's called depression of liver qi. So we tend to see there's more, again, more chest symptoms, specifically in the ribs with abdominal distention, bloating, burping, or any kind of reflux. And then the last pattern we tend to see that's kind of like a textbook pattern is called a blood deficiency pattern. And in the blood deficiency pattern we see things like a lot of emotional changes, palpitations, irritability, insomnia, even hiccups, and other symptoms of blood deficiency like dry skin, dry nails, dry hair, things like that. So again, in Chinese medicine, of course, every person with depression gets treated differently because there's an underlying etiological difference between all the different kinds of depression. And again, this isn't well differentiated in conventional medicine, but in Chinese medicine, this is the bread and butter of diagnosis. So those may sound like you, they may not. Those are some of the ways that a person may be approaching that. So I hope that helps. Before you go, you can check out my last two videos related to this right there and right there.