Acupuncture for Anxiety and Depression - 3 Ways it Can Help

Now you might be wondering about acupuncture. You've heard it can treat back pain and neck pain and some of these little nagging problems but can it treat something as severe as anxiety or depression? Well in today's video I want to share with you a few studies supporting how maybe how acupuncture works for anxiety but that it can work for anxiety and depression. Hey guys I'm Alex Hein, current doctoral student in Chinese medicine. Now in this first particular study 12 controlled trials were located out of which 10 were randomized controlled trials, RCTs. Now four of them focused on acupuncture in generalized anxiety disorder or anxiety neuroses. So in this case none of the studies were particularly focused on acupuncture for panic disorders, phobias or OCD. This was generalized anxiety or overall anxiety. Now the ultimate conclusion was that acupuncture, specifically auricular acupuncture, was more effective than acupuncture at sham points and maybe as effective as drug therapy in this situation. Now in another series of meta-analyses researchers took 514 articles, reduced them down based on their methodological quality to 11 articles and here's what they found about acupuncture and anxiety. With this studies it showed positive and statistically significant effects from using acupuncture for treating subjects with anxiety. Now a third study done here was used for treating anxiety and major depressive disorder in pregnant women. Now in particular there were two groups here. Now the first group was receiving IVF and the second group of women was enrolled in a substance abuse program. Now in the case of the study done on women with major depressive disorder they found a significantly greater response in pregnant patients with a major depressive disorder receiving depression specific acupuncture versus non-specific acupuncture. Now in terms of the overall rate of remission, so in other words how long they kept these results for, researchers found significantly greater rates of remission at 10 weeks in patients who received depression specific acupuncture versus non-specific acupuncture at random points. And finally the researchers concluded that the strongest evidence lies within the population of pregnant women. One highest quality study with a relatively large sample size of 150 provided evidence to support acupuncture as a monotherapy for pregnant women with major depressive disorder, so as a standalone therapy. Now obviously any practitioner that's been patients for a while knows that you can treat anxiety with acupuncture. I like to highlight a lot of the case studies here and a lot of the research just so that people know that much of this is well supported and increasingly well supported by science. But just like with Chinese medicine and anxiety in particular we almost always look for other constellations of symptoms and other signs in regard to what's going on the person's body. So if you were a person coming in for an acupuncture appointment or for herbal therapy primarily the practitioner would not only do a conventional intake, look at your pulse, look at your tongue, take a case history, maybe do physical palpation on your body to see what's going on, but also they would look at the overall picture of your health. So there's very often a whole other cluster of symptoms going on and at the same time this entire picture paints something very useful in the Chinese medicine landscape. In other words this whole picture, the cluster of symptoms is what gives a much more accurate picture of what's going on with a person's health rather than just saying I have anxiety, where can you put the needles. So I hope that helps. I want to know below before you go, have you ever had acupuncture or received treatment for anxiety with herbs? What were your results? Comment right there below. Hey guys I'm Alex I hope you liked this video. The best way to stay in touch is to grab that free guide on my site, 5 Daily Rituals to Help You Add 10 Years to Your Life with Chinese Medicine. Click the monk dude right there to subscribe, watch the last video that just came out and otherwise I will catch you in the next video.