How Often Do I Need To Come In For Acupuncture?
Although there is no one size fits all answer to this questions. We can give you general guidelines of how often you will need to come in for Acupuncture Treatments depending on where you fit on the injury/condition spectrum.
During your initial evaluation your practitioner will help figure out a customized treatment plan.
How Often Do I Need Acupuncture?
ACUTE
Acute care is for those conditions that just came up. Its best to address these conditions with a series of treatments before the body creates compensation patterns and they become Chronic nagging issues. Here are a few examples of acute conditions.:
- You’ve suffered a recent injury or are dealing with a short term ailment. Maybe you sprained your ankle, hurt your shoulder, or low back.
- Its that time of the year and your sinus/allergy condition flared up and you need to nip it before it gets worse.
This phase of your treatment is crucial. You need to be aggressive with your treatment. It’s important to give your body the optimal environment to heal. We will want to see you 2-3x’s per week for the first 1-2 weeks.
Your care depends entirely on how you quickly your body responds to acupuncture. Acute conditions need more treatment up front for a shorter period of time. A chronic condition takes longer to treat, therefore treatments for chronic conditions will be spaced over a longer period of time.
Remember! The longer you’ve had a problem – the longer it takes to treat. Unless your condition comes from trauma symptoms take years to manifest!
Please refer to the following article I wrote on how acupuncture works and why it’s often times not a one time fix! Acupuncture is Medicine – Not Magic!
The affects of acupuncture are cumulative. It takes time to ignite the bodies natural healing propensities and build up the endogenous endorphins & neuropeptides from within the body which help fight your conditions. That is why it’s important to build up the effects of acupuncture right away instead of constantly chasing the symptoms.
In the acute care phase your treatment plan will be a little more aggressive. You can expect to come in for acupuncture at least 1-3 times weekly for the first two weeks.
After your symptoms are relieved and you feel better we move on to the maintenance treatments to ensure you stay healthy and pain free!
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TRANSITIONAL CARE
This is the phase of care where you’re feeling better but you don’t want to lose all the progress you’ve made!
You can’t just stop coming in. Remember, Acupuncture is cumulative! You need to keep building!
In the Transitional Care phase we will start to spread the time between your treatments apart. If you’re symptoms come back, we know that your body wasn’t quite ready for that much time between treatments and we need to decrease the time between treatments
The goal is to find the sweet spot. This is finding the amount of time between treatments where your symptoms start to come back! We are all unique and have different sweet spots.
For example;
Many patients with migraines come in 1-3 times weekly for a month. Once their symptoms reside, we will see them once a week for 2 weeks. If everything is going smoothly we will move this to every other week. Until we hit a sweet spot of once a month or potentially once every 6-8 weeks or as needed!
We’ll keep pushing your appointments out further and further until we find your sweet spot. Then you’ve move on to the third level – maintenance care.
MAINTENANCE CARE
For whatever reason – even though i’m not the least bit mechanically inclined – in clinic I always talk about health conditions in terms of automobiles. It’s important to continually flush your engine, clean out the lines, and change the oil every 3-5,000 miles, depending on how sensitive your car runs! Your body works the same way. Its important to maintain and give your body self care to keep it out running smoothly!
A little preventative self-care and self-love can save you a lot in the long run!
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