As a practitioner of Chinese Medicine, I hear from a lot of people that Acupuncture or even herbal medicine is too expensive, too slow to work, or ambiguous whether it is even working, especially when compared to pharmaceutical solutions where a single pill can relieve an issue quickly, cost-effectively, and definitively, like anxiety.  From a pure dollars perspective this is 100% true, but the price you pay is its effect on your body’s ecosystem.  A healthy ecosystem (whether our bodies or Nature) is invaluable and cannot and should not be quantified, for it is the basis for everything else meaningful in life.  Health is the kind of resource that once lost, sometimes no amount of wealth can buy back, as people who have experienced the life-changing effects of chronic illness can attest to.  This similar sentiment also applies to our natural world and the resources and enrichment it provides.  

Pharmaceuticals are very specific solutions that have been extracted from nature and then chemically-combined and recombined to be very targeted solutions for very specific problems, which they do extremely well, but at the expense of the rest of the system, which we call ‘side effects’.  If one problem needs a quick fix, pharmaceuticals are a good clutch player - they can fill a role in a time of need extremely well.  If you have a cold and coughing is keeping you up, TylenolPM can allow you to rest and therefore recover.  However, over the long term, because they don’t address the imbalance in the system that stemmed the issue in the first place, nor how the side effects from the medication are now affecting the system, while also allowing you to continue the habits that brought you to this situation in the first place by masking symptoms, pharmaceuticals taken long-term are contributing to the slow, but progressive degradation of your ecosystem, or health.  We aren’t born with anxiety, usually something has happened along the way, or commonly we are experiencing a nutritional deficit that leads to anxiety (more on blood deficiency later).

By contrast, herbal medicine and acupuncture use whole systems to treat and interact with whole systems. Acupuncture developed in a time when people did not view the human experience as disparate parts requiring disparate interventions, which we now are accepting as true - every interaction with the body, mind, or Spirit affects not just the body, but it’s inter-dependence with all other parts.  When one area is affected it affects the whole: when you receive acupuncture for headaches for example, other things change along the way too, like sleep, digestion, anxiety, general nervous system regulation, etc. I also consider an herb a whole system, because like food, while we may have identified a single chemical compound active in mitigating anxiety, there’s a constellation of other chemical compounds within that herb or food that helps that single compound to be more easily assimilated or enhanced within the body, or is doing something helpful that we have even yet to identify!  The seemingly inactive chemical compounds help us to more readily reap the herb’s fullest benefits, with less side effects.  Herein lies the increased efficacy of herbal formulas compared to single herbs.  When the complexity of whole systems interact with the complexity of whole systems there is exponentially more opportunity for maximizing the overall potential of both systems, because there are so many more mutually beneficial connections that can be made!  The end result yields an ecosystem that is more abundant, more productive, more self-regulating, solves for other problems, and is more resilient.  Is resiliency not the definition of a healthy system?  While i believe that there is a place and time for pharmaceutical interventions, I will almost always suggest how to use whole foods or herbs as medicine, before suggesting single extract supplements, and then medications.  Whole systems inherently know how to relate to whole systems.  As Andrew Sterman says, “Life loves Life!”.

The resilience of natural systems comes from their complex interconnections.  While we as humans think reductionistically to identify the most active compound driving an herb’s efficacy, or reduce pain to the site of the imbalance, what if something’s efficacy or lack of efficacy exists in how the elements within that system are working together?  I have a friend Sam who was a former college high jumper and now coaches Olympic level track and field athletes.  After observing that physical strength had surprisingly little relation to muscle mass in archery, I asked him what made a person physically strong.  He responded that it actually had to do with how well the body’s muscle and nerve fibers are working in coordination… Interesting!  Acupuncture and herbal medicine may be slower to work than pharmaceuticals, but they solve a problem by rectifying and reinforcing the connections between elements that comprise health - communications between organ systems, the mind-body connection, blood oxygenation and circulation, neuro-endocrine connections, and so on and so forth.  Acupuncture and herbal medicine increase the amount of interactions within your system, and therefore increases its complexity.  Ecosystems that are more complex are more resilient, which means they are better able to tolerate and recover from disturbances than ecosystems that are less complex.  When we prioritize efficiency (which we inevitably must at times in this day and age) the tradeoff is resilience.  As an alternative medical provider, I am naturally biased towards natural interventions, because I believe in our bodies innate wisdom and capacity for healing and renewal, and the tools that tap into that evolutionary wealth of knowledge. I am inviting you to consider the true value of acupuncture and herbal medicine, as an opportunity to engage in more robust and resilient health!

Evidence-based Healthcare:

This study compares the efficacy of Lorazepam vs. the Chinese herbal formulas Suan Zao Ren Tang and Zhi Zi Chi Tang in the treatment of anxiety and insomnia: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4352487/  At 2 weeks time they had equal efficacy on insomnia, but at 4 weeks time, changes in objective and subjective sleep measures indicated that subjects taking SZRT+ZZCT experienced greater benefit compared to those taking Lorazepam.  Regarding anxiety, those taking SZRT+ZZCT experienced a more powerful reduction in anxiety at 2 and 4 weeks time compared to those taking Lorazepam. Disclaimer: The brilliance of Oriental Medicine is that there is no one acupuncture point prescription or herbal prescription that corresponds to an issue, which this study could suggest.  While this study only illustrates one type of imbalance, insomnia and anxiety can come from at least 12 different types of imbalances, and therefore at least 12 different herbal formula and point prescriptions to choose from, which is why you should always seek a Chinese Medicine practitioner to diagnose and prescribe herbs and acupuncture for an issue.  

This article entry was inspired by herbal teacher Ann Wolman, herbalist Asia Dorsey, Fractal Praxis work by Caroline Savery, the Denver Permaculture Design Course, and a talk given by Water Harvester Brad Lancaster.