Can Acupuncture Help Neuropathy?

Can acupuncture help neuropathy? Hey, I'm Dr. Josh. I'm an acupuncture physician here in Tampa, Florida, and I treat quite a bit of neuropathy. So, I wanna answer this question for you. The short answer is yes, acupuncture is incredibly effective at helping neuropathy. Let me give you a bit more of an answer so you can understand what really causes neuropathy, some of the main symptoms that you or a loved one might be experiencing. I'll walk you through the three main ways that acupuncture can help neuropathy, and then I'll walk you through one of the main studies that was performed in 2007 that proves how effective acupuncture really is for neuropathy compared to just conventional treatment alone. So, look, let's walk through the three main causes of neuropathy that I see here in my office. So, first, and one of the largest causes of neuropathy here in the United States is diabetic neuropathy. That's where we have elevated blood sugar levels. Over time, the elevation of blood sugar, that literally, that sugar circulating around in your blood vessels causes damage to the inside lining of those vessels, and they kind of wither away and they die, and they don't provide blood and oxygen and nutrients to nerves to give them the food that they need to grow, so those nerves end up withering away and dying. So, that's one of the main causes that we see of neuropathy here in the United States. The other two causes are gonna be chemotherapy-induced neuropathy, which is another really common cause, and then smoking-induced neuropathy. So, in the end, the problem's the same thing. It's where there's damage to blood vessels that supply nerves the oxygen, blood, and nutrients they need to feed them, and if nerves don't get food to grow and be strong and healthy, then they're literally atrophied. They start to wither away and they die, and they don't provide the electrical signal that's needed to do the job, and so you get a lot of symptoms, and some of the main symptoms that you might be experiencing or your loved one might be experiencing are gonna be pain, numbness, tingling, burning sensations. It generally occurs in the hands or the feet. It can cause really bad sensitivity to wearing socks or to having the bedsheets over your feet at night. Those are some of the common complaints I hear. It feels like you're walking on cotton balls or you got a bunch of socks on your feet and you just can't feel the floor like you used to. So, ultimately, what happens is that loss of sensory information causes balance issues, and those balance issues can be really bad. They can cause falls and traumas and really just wreak havoc on your life. So, aside from the discomfort and pain that is associated with neuropathy, there's also that loss of balance, and that can be really problematic as we start aging because neuropathy really, it's a progressive disease, right, it's just not well treated here in America because really the only treatment that conventional medicine provides is gabapentin or Neurontin, and those are, honestly, they can help dull the pain, but they don't help to fix the root cause of the problem. So, the problem just persists and becomes more progressive over time, right? So, those are the main causes and symptoms of neuropathy. Let's walk through the three ways acupuncture can help with neuropathy. So, look, first thing, acupuncture, it's really well proven that it can do is it can help calm down pain. It doesn't matter what type of pain it is. Acupuncture is amazing if there's any type of pain. What it does is it helps your body to release endorphins, and endorphins are natural painkillers, right? We have what we call like endogenous opioids. They're really strong painkillers that our body can make, and we can use acupunctures to stimulate the production of these endorphins, these enkaplins, these endogenous opioids, these really strong painkilling chemicals. So, that's the first value of acupuncture. It can help to control your pain, and oftentimes it's more effective than conventional treatment, which is generally just, again, it's like that gabapentin. So, that's value number one. Value number two is we can actually help to massively increase blood flow and perfusion to tissues that we stimulate with acupuncture needles. So, we put acupuncture needles in very specific places, and it massively increases blood flow. And like we talked about, right, in the end, neuropathy is a problem of lack of blood flow. So, if we can stimulate blood flow to those nerves that are damaged and aren't functioning well, then we give them the food and the oxygen and the nutrients they need to help grow back. So, nerves can grow back about a millimeter a day if they have enough blood, oxygen, and nutrients. So, if we can massively increase blood flow to those nerves that aren't functioning well in your hands or your feet, then look, we can help to get them to grow back and actually restore function to them. So, that's the second value. Third value is acupuncture can actually help restore nerve function. Principally, when we put an acupuncture needle in, what we're doing is we're targeting those nerve fibers, those big old long electrical cords that are in your body. So, we put acupuncture needles in very specific places. We help to stimulate those nerves. Sometimes we'll add, we'll kind of jazz things up with a little bit of what we call microcurrent or electrical stimulation, and that literally helps to kind of jumpstart the functioning of those nerves. And so, when we combine this pain-killing effect, this massive increase in blood flow, and then literally direct stimulation of nerves in areas that aren't functioning well, we can help to bring back function to those dysfunctional nerves, calm your pain down, and help them grow back and restore balance to those tissues so that they do the job properly and you are left with less symptoms, right? So, we can help to reduce the pain, the numbness, the tingling, the burning sensations, and even help to restore balance. So, it's pretty effective. If you're dealing with neuropathy, I really highly suggest you get acupuncture. You really do need to get enough acupuncture. Look, it's not magic. It's not gonna just be one treatment. It's like going to the gym. You gotta go to the gym enough to build your muscles up to get big and strong. Same with acupuncture. We gotta really restore function, and that just takes time. Expect to go to acupuncture a couple times a week for eight, 12 weeks as a starting point if you have been experiencing or dealing with neuropathy. So, you really need to give it enough and the proper dose to get the function back to those nerves and those blood vessels. There's a really cool study that was done in 2008. I'm gonna pull it up here on my computer and give you the name of it. Let's see where it's right here. This was done in the European Journal of Neurology, really big journal. It was done in 2007. It's called Acupuncture Treatment Improves Nerve Conduction in Peripheral Neuropathy. So, what they did is they took two different groups of people, and one group, they got an acupuncture a couple times a week. The other group got just conventional treatment. So, they were just treating them with pharmaceutical agents, and then what they did is they looked at the outcomes of these two patients over time, and what they found is they did nerve conduction tests in both arms, both groups of these patients, and they found that the patients who received acupuncture had improvements in their nerve conduction tests. So, their nerves were literally functioning better, and they had a really significant reduction in pain and symptoms. So, the group with conventional treatment, where they just used pharmaceutical agents, they didn't really have any changes in their nerve conduction tests, and long-term, they fared much worse in terms of the amount of pain, discomfort, and symptoms they were experiencing. So, if you're dealing with neuropathy, what this shows is that, look, acupuncture's really helpful, it's really effective, and I highly suggest you find a qualified practitioner in your area that can give you acupuncture and give you enough acupuncture to really achieve the results that you're looking for. So, if you're here in Tampa, I'm your guy, you can come check me out, but otherwise, you can always shoot me a message, you can go to my Instagram, Dr. Handsome, that's doctor spelled all the way out, and shoot me a DM, and what I'll do is I'll see if I can find someone for you in your area, but if you're dealing with neuropathy, then, look, it makes sense to get acupuncture. It can really help you. Click that like and that subscribe button because I'm gonna come at you with some more great content. Have a good day.