Sharon Bernard needed something more effective than painkillers after her knee replacement knee surgery 2 years ago. She made her way to Acu Care where Kelly Wylie changed her life.
"I was trying to control the pain, and this just worked great for me" said Bernard, 67.
Wylie, a doctor of oriental medicine at Acu Care, said treatment for pain is the reason most patients seek her services.
"Some are already seeing their doctors for certain reasons, and for some, Western medicine can't do anything else for them," said Wylie. "Sometimes for pain they will give (patients) pain medications, but they're not addressing the actual issue of where the problem is coming from."
People have been turning to acupuncture for thousands of years to treat problems including pain, depression, addiction, fibromyalgia and recovery from stroke.
Acupuncture involves inserting thin needles at various depths into specific points of the body. It aims to balance the body's energy system. The needles can be moved gently by hand or stimulated by mild electricity or heat.
"Western medicine knows we have an energetic filed-when we do an ECG (electrocardiogram) on the brain, we are measuring the electrical impulses-and some people don't recognize that right offhand" Wylie said. "What the acupuncture is doing as well, is working our energetic system"
For Bernard, it doesn't matter how acupuncture works, it just works well for her. "At first, it was once a week for a couple of weeks. It just kept the pain down" She said.
