Health can be defined as resilience. Resilience is the ability of a system to successfully respond and adapt to outside stress. Resilient systems are like elastic: they may get temporarily pulled out of shape, but they quickly bounce back into place. This ability to quickly rebound from challenge or adversity is a key sign of resilience. A system that lacks resilience is brittle and easily compromised; when it encounters stress, instead of bouncing back, it simply breaks down.
In the context of health, your body is a system. An external stress might be something like a virus or a bacteria. If your body is resilient, even if it is exposed to a virus (an external stressor), you probably won’t get sick – your immune system will be able to successfully fight off the virus. Or if you do get sick, you will have mild symptoms and recover quickly. If your body is not so resilient, you may come down with a prolonged illness, and require medical treatment.
When it comes to medicine, we can see there are always two important factors to consider: external stress, and internal resilience.
Public health measures like hand washing are about avoiding or minimizing exposure to external stress. If we are exposed, then medications like antibiotics and antivirals disable or destroy the external stress. Following public health guidelines, and taking medications prescribed by your doctor are important, even life saving interventions. But what about internal resilience?
The treatment plans at Inner Alchemy Acupuncture – which include acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine – are specially designed to help increase your body’s resilience. The methods we use at our clinic focus on optimizing the body’s response to both physical and psychological stress.
At Inner Alchemy Acupuncture, we can adjust the immune system, reduce inflammation, improve blood flow, and balance the nervous system. This will enable your body to produce an optimal response to stress, to help prevent illness in the first place- or at the very least have a faster recovery.
These same mechanisms explain why acupuncture and herbal medicine can provide lasting relief from pain, promote tissue regeneration, improve digestive function, and regulate your sleep cycle. By increasing the body’s resilience, Chinese Medicine can treat many kinds of chronic ailments, including chronic pain and even autoimmune diseases.
If you’d like to improve your quality of life by increasing your body’s strength and resilience, Inner Alchemy Acupuncture is here for you. You can call us today and schedule your initial consultation: (561) 629-1888.
