The saying “don’t fix it if it’s not broken” may hold true for some things, but it’s not a good idea to apply it to your own health. We tend to think of “treatment” in terms of symptoms. You treat illnesses, conditions, ailments and diseases, right? Well, sure, you should treat those things, but the fact is, those things might occur less often if you followed a health maintenance plan.
Just as exercise helps maintain a healthy weight and meditation helps maintain a relaxed mind, acupuncture helps maintain a healthy body. Rather than only addressing existing problems, a skilled acupuncturist will seek to prevent problems.
Qi is the body’s energy, and meridians are the pathways along which qi travels. If you think of qi as a stream and the meridians as waterways, it is easy to picture how even a slight disruption of the flow could cause a ripple in your health, just as a large stone creates a ripple in a stream.
Maintenance is important for everyone, but if you have a chronic condition or have been injured in some way that causes chronic pain, regular acupuncture can change your life. As an example, imagine someone who has constant neck pain due to an injury sustained in a car accident. That person lives with the pain for years, then tries acupuncture and cannot believe how well it works.
Our imaginary chronic pain sufferer continues seeing his acupuncturist for about 6 months and continues to improve and feel better the whole time. Then, life happens and he misses an appointment and forgets to reschedule. He thinks, “I’m feeling great though, so maybe it’s time to save a little money and stop going for acupuncture so often.”
After a few months, he begins to feel a little stiffness in his neck. It’s just vague, just a little twinge early in the morning. He ignores it and continues telling all his friends about how much acupuncture helped.
But the pain in the mornings keeps getting a little worse each week, and his range of motion seems to be decreasing – just a little. By the time he returns to the acupuncturist, he needs another series of weekly treatments to return to his happy pain-free lifestyle.
While the need to save money and time is understandable, in the end, the imaginary chronic pain sufferer would have saved more money by going into maintenance mode and scheduling an appointment every month, or every other month or even every three months, instead of waiting until he needed a whole series of weekly treatments again.
Regardless of your situation, maintenance visits with Wayne will help you stay centered, calm, relaxed and healthy. It only takes a couple of minutes to schedule maintenance appointments for the year, so do yourself a favor and get on our calendar!
