Video: Acupuncture being used to help people with alpha gal syndrome

New this morning, a Tulsa acupuncture and massage spa says they're helping treat people with alpha-gal syndrome. I learned about the treatment and heard from people who say it's changed their lives. I wanted to help people with massages with their aches and pains. Ginger Spencer is an acupuncturist that runs Relax Renew Medical Massage in Tulsa. Several years ago she met someone with alpha-gal syndrome and started researching different treatments. That's when she found electro-needling acupuncture. What it does is electrical current that goes through your body. It goes through your neurological system, digestive, you're nervous. You can get alpha-gal syndrome from a lone star tick bite and people with alpha-gal develop allergic reactions to red meat. According to the National Institute of Health, studies show the SAAT method of acupuncture have helped ease symptoms for some people with alpha-gal. Ginger says her acupuncture is similar but different because of the electro-needling. My thing is I do hit the vagus nerve which makes it a lot more different because I'm making the nervous system reset itself. She says she did a lot of reading and research before perfecting her technique. My science through it is trigger points. So you have to remember the trigger points is they're knotted. They're tight. They carry waste. They carry toxins. They don't get blood flow through them and also it carries a lot of oxygen in that one spot. Ginger says she has a 95% success rate and most people only have to come once. Zoe Fast is from Fort Gibson and was diagnosed with alpha-gal when she was 16. Her mom is a nurse and heard about Ginger's treatment. And then my mom found Ginger. I came to Ginger before she had her own place and she's helped me ever since. Zoe told me she was struggling with severe stomach issues, itching and canker sores. I was just kind of at the point to where I was like I'll do anything to feel better because I was having such bad reactions to where I couldn't even eat out at a restaurant with just everything being cross-contaminated or even fumes like someone cooking a steak or anything like couldn't be around it. Now Zoe doesn't have any of those problems. Obviously I was like oh my gosh this is awesome because one of my favorite foods is steak. I was like yes. Randall Plumlee from Salina has a similar story. He says he had anaphylactic reactions to red meat. Randall says after getting the acupuncture treatment he can eat normally. I've had no symptoms at all. She at the very end she goes you're good to go. You can go and have a 100% grain-fed hamburger. Unfortunately there's no cure for alpha-gal syndrome that we are aware of at this point. We spoke with Dr. Kyle Shoaff with Utica Park Clinic in Catoosa. He says he read about a study from 2021 that looked at acupuncture treatment for alpha-gal and it had a high success rate. The problem with the study was that there wasn't anything that looked if the patients had a confirmed lab test for alpha-gal syndrome before participating in this and since it was a study that looked backwards at it on patients who had the treatment it didn't look at if there was anything that happened to patients who had kind of a placebo treatment which is kind of hard to do with acupuncture. He says there needs to be more research done on it before it becomes a recommended method. Currently it's not something they advise as treatment. It's obviously something that if someone is really suffering from it or has a severe reaction and they wanted to try it, acupuncture generally if performed in a safe and clean manner is something that is not going to be harmful likely but as far as curing alpha-gal syndrome there's not really a way that it's going to take away that allergic response. Now if you want to learn more about Relax Renew Medical Massage and their treatment or the different studies on how acupuncture affects alpha-gal, we have all of that linked in this story on Fox23.com.