Transcription:
Top Five Things You Should Know About Acupuncture

Melanie Cole (Host):  Acupuncture is a form of Chinese medicine that has been practiced for centuries. My guest today is Paul Magee. He’s a licensed acupuncturist at Allina Health Woodbury Clinic. Welcome to the show, Paul. Tell us first, because people do not know. What is acupuncture?

Paul Magee (Guest):  Acupuncture is the insertion of very small, very tiny needles. They are all surgical stainless steel. They are all perfectly sterile and they go into very specific spots in the body. At a basic level, that is what acupuncture is.

Melanie:  So, a little bit more than basic, then, what it is intended to do?

Mr. Magee:  Absolutely. So, what acupuncture does, what traditional Chinese medicine which acupuncture is a part of tries to do is to rebalance the body--sort of stimulate the body to rebalance itself using its own chemicals, its own processes. We’re not introducing anything aside from the needles into the body.

Melanie:  How does that help?  There are a lot of--people call them “theories”, but they’re not necessarily theories. What you do works for so many people. Explain how that does.

Mr. Magee:  Well, on one level, we’re still trying to figure out from a Western perspective what acupuncture does in the body. The things that we know it does are, we know it affects the nervous system directly. If you put an acupuncture needle into someone and do a brain scan on them, it has changed the way that the brain is functioning. We also know that it changes the chemistry of the body. The body starts to release more endorphins, the body starts to get more sensitive to its own endorphin and the body also starts to increase the flow of blood to certain areas. So, we don’t have one universal theory from a Western perspective of how acupuncture works. We are still beginning to study that. We’ve only really had about 20 or 30 years where we’ve begun to look at that. Traditionally, what I would tell you is that we look at the body and we see a large network of “channels”, is what we call them--meridians--through which energy and blood flow. So, when we look at someone who is unwell, we are looking for the places in that network where that energy in the blood is not flowing well. We essentially reduce the human condition down to a plumbing problem and start working with specific spots to reduce or increase the flow of energy and blood.

Melanie:  Wow. That’s absolutely fascinating. What type of illness or conditions do you typically see?

Mr. Magee:  Well, probably the thing that we work the most with is pain. Especially with the issues that we’re having with our modern medicine with the over dependence on opioid pain killers, we’re really beginning to see a lot more people who are dealing with chronic pain who are coming in to see us to begin to, hopefully, wean themselves off or never go on them in the first place. That’s just sort of what’s getting our foot in the door with a lot of big medical systems like Allina. We also treat nausea very well. We treat allergies. We treat digestive problems. There are people that are specialists in acupuncture for fertility and for inducing labor. Really, it’s important to remember that this was the only form of medicine in all of Asia for several thousands of years. So, they figured out how to work with pretty much everything. It’s just what do we work with as well or better than Western medicine is kind of what we’re working at now.

Melanie:  I’m quite sure that the biggest question you get when you are discussing needles is, does it hurt?

Mr. Magee:  Well, I’d like to say “no” but the truth is occasionally. The level of pain from the needles that we use is pretty minute. It is much more like getting a mosquito bite than it is like getting a shot. The needles that we’re using are tiny. They are smaller than a human hair and, unlike what most people associate with needles, they’re not hollow. They’re not tubes. They are just a solid shaft with a very sharp point. The only way to see the actually point is to put it under an electron microscope. They’re that small. So, you can fit probably about a dozen of our needles into the tip of a hypodermic needle. Very rarely, they give a little pinch as they go in but it only lasts for a second and it becomes a very relaxing thing the moment the needles are in.

Melanie:  And, if you’re scared of needles?

Mr. Magee:  I work with people every day that are scared of needles. I’ve got a lot of tricks to get them in comfortably. We can either show them the needles or not, depending on what kind of triggers their fear and if worse comes to worse, I can use some of the other bits of training that I have. We can use acupressure for someone who’s really, really nervous about the needles but I’ve never had anyone that I wasn’t able to gradually wean onto being relaxed to me using as many needles as I think they needed.

Melanie:  What are some common misconceptions that you have been clearing up for your career that people have about acupuncture?

Mr. Magee:  Well, probably the biggest one is that if someone is coming in with a specific complaint, we’re only going to talk about that. Say, someone had sprained their wrist. We are going to talk about the wrist but we are also going to talk about a lot of the other things that are going on in their body because acupuncture deals with patients holistically which means we’re looking at the whole person, not necessarily just the bit that got hurt. Our system of medicine makes connections between symptoms that sometimes don’t make perfect sense to someone who isn’t trained in it. If someone’s coming in with knee pain and I start to ask them about how their urination is doing, that may not make sense in the patients but I’m working out the patterns that I need to to make a proper diagnosis. I guess their biggest misconception is that we’re just going to talk about the one thing, we’re just going to treat the one problem and we don’t. We look at everything and I promise in looking at everything, we’re never going to ignore the problem that brought them in.

Melanie:  That’s really, really good information. How many acupuncture sessions do you typically need to see improvements?

Mr. Magee:  I’d say typically you’re beginning to see improvements by about the third or the fourth at the latest. It may not be done. It may not be all the way to what we’re going to be able to accomplish for that patient but you usually begin to see some measurable changes after a few sessions--very rarely after one. There are a few people that we’ve had to go as long as maybe six sessions before they started to see some improvements. If we’re not getting anything after six sessions, we discontinue. I don’t feel the need to waste anyone’s time or money.

Melanie:  How long are the sessions?

Mr. Magee:  About 40-50 minutes. It depends. The needles stay in for about half an hour but the intake is what takes a variable amount of time. So, with an initial patient, it’s going to take longer. I usually ask them to schedule about an hour and then for returning patient it’s usually about 45 minutes.

Melanie:  Does insurance cover acupuncture?

Mr. Magee:  It does sometimes and it really is important for patients to call their insurance company and check. You look at the number on the back your insurance card and ask about acupuncture benefit.  A lot of the companies will cover it but not necessarily for every plan within that company. Medicare does not yet. It doesn’t do it at all.

Melanie:  Why do you think--and we only have a few minutes left Paul. It’s fascinating. Why do you think people are biased against it?  They hear the words “chi” and “energy” and they’re not sure that they buy into it. What do you tell them?

Mr. Magee:  What I tell them is that what we’re having an issue with is not ideas or concepts, it’s language. So, if you look at the idea of chi and chi in Chinese literally translates to “energy” and if you think about the word energy in English it means a lot of different things. It means the amount of kinetic energy, physical energy you can measure off of an explosion. It means sort of the mystical--what you feel when you’re in meditation. In Chinese, it has the same level of range. So, in Chinese gasoline is literally translated as “chi oil”. If you look at the word chi and say “energy”, with most people, they’re going to go, “Well, that sounds kind of meditative and metaphysical”. If you replace energy with the word “function”, it all of a sudden becomes much more pragmatic. We’re not talking about lung energy we’re talking about lung function. We’re not talking about stuck energy, we’re talking about a function in the body that’s gotten stuck. Like, if you look at a spasmed muscle, what we would translate that into in Chinese medicine would be chi stagnation – the energy there has gotten stuck. If you think about it, the function of that muscle has gotten stuck in the on position and so all of the things that we do to get that muscle to unstick are traditionally phrased as “moving chi”. So, really, I think the biggest issue is that it’s a language barrier. It’s not actually understanding the concepts on a deep enough level to find the right words in English or not understanding English well enough to put those words into proper English or understandable English.

Melanie:  Give your best advice to people that are considering acupuncture for various chronic conditions.

Mr. Magee:  Sure. My best advice is find a licensed acupuncturist. Find someone that’s gone through all of the training to be just an acupuncturist. They’re the ones that are going to know the most about it. They’re the ones that are going to understand how to look at the body holistically. The other bit of advice is to be a little bit patient. Acupuncture does take a little bit of time to make a big change in the body and so it’s not going to necessarily work as fast as a medication would but the side effects are a lot less common and a lot safer.

Melanie:  Thank you so much, Paul. It’s really great information. You’re listening to The Wellcast with Allina Health. For more information, you can go to allinahealth.org. That’s allinahealth.org. This is Melanie Cole. Thanks so much for listening.