Acupuncture and Pain

What is Acupuncture?

Acupuncture is a professional, nationally recognised health treatment developed through refining thousands of years of clinical experience and research.

Acupuncture uses fine, single-use needles to stimulate your body's self-healing functions to return you to optimal health.
Treatment with acupuncture is comfortable and relaxing and can effectively treat various health issues from pain to insomnia and infertility.

Acupuncture philosophy is based on the understanding that good health depends on an abundant and free-flowing energy source.

Acupuncture meridians mirror the anatomical pathways of the nervous system. It can stimulate your body to produce energy more efficiently or redirect circulation to bring you back to a balanced state.

This alleviates your symptoms and corrects the underlying problem that led to them in the first place instead of just treating the presenting symptom.

For example, suppose an 80 years old lady is experiencing tinnitus. In that case, it is often associated with Kidney as it manifests in the ears. Acupuncturists will work on the kidney channel to nourish kidney essence and quite the tinnitus.

A Chinese Medicine practitioner may also use Chinese herbs to strengthen and support the healing.

The Lane Cove rooms are at 2 Austin Street, directly opposite the Lane Cove Library and a few metres from Longueville Road. If you are coming from the village it is a walk of two or three minutes, and the parking behind the library is the easiest option in the middle of the day.

Lane Cove sends a particular mix of problems through the door. There are the desk-and-commute necks and low backs from St Leonards and the city, the shoulders and elbows of a suburb that plays a lot of tennis, and the knees and Achilles tendons that come with living on a hillside — the stairs down to Tambourine Bay and the streets off Burns Bay Road are their own kind of training load. Lane Cove also has a lot of people in their thirties and forties carrying small children, which is its own demand on a back.

A first appointment is mostly questions and movement testing: where the pain is, what makes it worse, what it stops you doing, and how it has behaved over weeks rather than days. From there you should leave knowing what is proposed, roughly how long it is expected to take, and what would mean changing the plan.

Worth bringing: any imaging or specialist letters you already have, a list of medications, and the shoes you actually walk or train in. If the pain is new and severe, follows a significant fall, or comes with numbness, weakness, fever or any change in bladder or bowel control, see a doctor first — that is a medical assessment, not a treatment question.

The nearest alternative if Lane Cove does not suit you is the Freshwater side, about 14 kilometres away across the Spit.