People see their acupuncturist for a wide variety of reasons, both acute and chronic, symptomatically severe and mild. But all my patients have one very consistent commonality: They want results.
Without this, the cost-return analysis becomes less than satisfactory and the benefits are compromised for all involved.

Let me explain how acupuncture works.

Acupuncture works in a series of treatments.
You can never have acupuncture treatments too close together, but you can definitely have them too far apart.  Asian medicine works cumulatively and through momentum.
That’s how energy works.
The point being that we, as Asian medical providers, want to continue building on your progress so we get the very best outcomes possible.

If we treat you today, but the symptoms slowly start to creep back in, so by the time we treat you again a week later we are back at square one – we’ve waited too long between appointments.
We can get stuck in this see-saw of symptom severity: improving, then getting worse, then improving, and then regressing again… We don’t want this.  We want your symptoms and underlying conditions to steadily improve, and improve, and improve.

In order to accomplish this I often ask to see my patients twice a week for the first 1-3 weeks.
After that, as long as your symptoms are improving consistently between appointments, we can reduce the frequency to one appointment per week.  We can continue treatments once per week as long as your symptoms continue to improve and stabilize between appointments.

But, if symptoms start to regress, then I’ll want to see you as soon as possible so we don’t lose ground on all of our progress.

Once the symptoms are basically gone, then we’ll go into tune-up mode where I have my patient come in every 2-3 weeks to check in.  And I typically have all of my patients come in at least once per month for their tune-up treatments.

This is the best approach for getting lasting results quickly and cost-effectively.

Written by Dennis von Elgg, L.Ac.
http://redwoodneedle.com
Published here with permission