Acupuncture: A Therapeutic Analysis

In a recent news article published by the daily mail, it was reported that “a three-year-old boy from south China was hospitalized with a parasitic infection after his mother forced him to eat live frogs to cure his epilepsy” (McKay 2015). Friends of the young boy’s mother had suggested that she try the old folk medicine of swallowing live frogs to cure epilepsy. Evidently, this recommendation was just a myth. However, people should not let one nonsensical story deter them from trying more natural remedies when it comes to epilepsy. Epilepsy is one of the “most common serious neurological disorders” affecting approximately 70 million people in the world (Brodie, Schachter, and Kwan 2012: 9). Epilepsy is caused by an overabundance of abnormal …show more content…
Although, acupuncture has been part of Chinese medicine for more than 3,000 years, it was only introduced in the 1970’s to the U.S. and Canada. Since the time of its introduction, acupuncture has been one of most commonly requested form of complementary therapy for treatment of epilepsy to be used in combination with conventional medicine. According to Bob Clarke, who is an acupuncturist at the Open Gate Acupuncture and Herbal Medicine clinic in Oregon, acupuncture has aided in reliving the amount and severity of his patient’s seizures (Murphy 2002). The goal of acupuncture is not only to relieve seizures, but to also “treat the cause of the illness – to treat the whole patient and to restore the balance between the physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of life” (Murphy 2002). There are a lot of elements that surround how a person is coping with a medical condition, such as personal feelings, family matters, environment, diet and more. All of these circumstances affect how fast or how slow a person is healing. Often times, physicians are trained to only view the objective information observed from their physical examination and this causes a narrow lens for healing (Holmes 2013: 152). It is necessary to factor in “the way in which illness is worked into the narrative renderings of broader experience” because there is a need to correlate …show more content…
According to research, around 80 percent of people with epilepsy have temporal lobe epilepsy, which means that the seizures emerge from the temporal lobe of the brain. In the same region of the brain is the auditory cortex, which is where sounds and music are processed. Therefore, there is a correlation between sounds and seizures and the brains of people with epilepsy tend to react differently to music compared to the brains of people without the medical condition. When listening to music, the brain wave activity of people with epilepsy was more in sync with the music instead of being in abnormal state (Predit 2015). In terms of music therapy, there is not right music to listen to; music selection is dependent on the person with epilepsy and how they feel. This is because not everyone reacts to music the same way. It is important to choose songs that match your mood. For example, calm paced classical music such as Mozart’s helps with mental organization and jazz helps with loosening up. However, it is best to limit the duration of music therapy as “the brain responds to variety and too much of any one stimulus produces a kind of fatigue and even irritation” (Fletcher 2004: 65). Although, music therapy is relatively new compared to biomedicine and Chinese medicine, it is a good healing method to look into for people who are afraid of taking pills and afraid of