Herbal medicine accentuates the effectiveness of the acupuncture treatments.
Chinese Herbs are one of the most exciting and challenging aspects to your treatment here at Good Life Acupuncture and Wellness Center. They are exciting because we are distilling 3-5000 years of cultural knowledge and experience to give you, our patient, a custom-blended formula. This custom formula takes into consideration your symptoms, constitution, western medications, size, age, health and many other factors. Where else in modern health care can you get such personalized, customized attention.
And its challenging because each and every patient comes to us with a different set of experiences, preferences, history and desired outcome. We get the privilege to take all this into consideration when prescribing a formula for you. This is incredibly challenging, but then again this is why we are here.
A typical formula will have approximately a dozen herbs in it. Each herb has specific qualities that have been vetted over thousands of years that make it perfectly useful in combination with the other herbs at the specific ratio at which it is included. There are several hundred different herbs that can be used for a typical formula and several thousand herbs available for the less common ones. We don’t use any endangered species or harmful/cruelly derived substances at Good Life, most herbs are minerals or plant-based substances.
There are different types of delivery that we can use, i.e. tinctures, raw herbs or pills. Most of our clients are comfortable with pills initially and then will become confident enough with their experience that they will try granulated or even raw herbs. There is some difference in terms of strength, as the processing of the freeze-dried granules and pills reduces the efficacy somewhat. However, we will defer to your choice if/when the time comes to prescribe a formula. Of course all our herbal products are manufactured in accordance with Good Manufacturing Processes, which insure that there are no foreign materials, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, bugs, etc. in the formulas.
If you and your practitioner decide to include herbs in your treatment the formula will take into consideration your constitution, size, diagnosis (western and eastern) as well as which herbs may not be appropriate for your presentation. Having considered all these variables, they will discuss with you your preference for a medium and will walk you through preparation or dosage depending upon what you are comfortable with and what format fits your budget. Taking Chinese herbs isn’t required, but many clients find that the power of herbal formulas helps them heal faster and accentuate the effectiveness of the acupuncture treatments.