As an acupuncturist, I am able to address a lot of conditions. According to the World Health Organization, acupuncture can alleviate symptoms of the following concerns:

But, to be clear, there doesn’t need to be something “wrong” with you for us to work together. Likewise, there is nobody who is “too broken” to benefit from acupuncture and East Asian medical theory.

Western medicine generally seeks to return “ill” bodies to a set point of health, a “before” state of integrity. In this way, it is concerned with diagnosis and controlling outcomes. It deals primarily with morphological issues: if the chief complaint can be captured in a lab, imaging, or exam, there are treatment options. Western medicine saves lives, and I’m intensely grateful for it’s heroic ability to respond to extensive systemic or deep local damage.

In contrast, East Asian medicine organizes around patterns and change. It emerges from a physiological and philosophical view that mind and body are inextricably related expressions of being adapting to our constantly changing natural world. As such it deals primarily with functional attunement.

Acupuncture seeks to regulate the body’s ability to respond in the moment. In this tradition, a healthy body is a body able to shift with the seasons, a body which can reasonably recover from harm (while having been changed by it), and one which processes experience with ease rather than dis-ease.

Acupuncture can be incredibly effective at treating what Western medicine would consider “sub-clinical” conditions: issues that are symptomatic but have not yet caused tissue change. It also offers relief from compounding symptoms in those with more progressed concerns.

For more information on my specific areas of focus within this field, please visit the “about Laura” page.