What can I expect on my first visit to an acupuncturist? Learn what to expect and what will happen during your first acupuncture treatment session. When you come in for the first time, I ask for a health...
When you come in for the first time, I ask for a health history - a long health history. We'll go over that before we start treatment. I'll tell [patients] first off, after going over their history, whether I think I can help them or not. And then with their permission, I'll begin acupuncture treatment at the time of the initial visit. Whether or not they have to change clothes depends on what I'm treating, but the average person just has to take off their shoes and socks. They'll sit on a table, I'll sit beside them and palpate their wrist, and check their pulse - and we do it in a way that'd different from Western medicine - we're not checking just the weight of the pulse, we're checking the quality of the pulse.
I tend to use points on their hands and feet, so they need to take off their shoes and socks. If they have a problem like low back pain or hip pain, I may need them to change into a patient gown.
If they're coming in for pain, they should see an immediate improvement and they should feel better after treatment. If a person comes for allergies or sinus problems, the average person will say they can breathe more easily, that their nose has opened up; the headache that is associated with it - they'll say that the pain has gone down in their head, and sometimes I've had people say pain is completely gone - it's 100 percent better. When there's an immediate problem, there should be an immediate response. Now if a person has other types of symptoms, for example if I'm treating a woman with menopause and she normally has night sweats and I'm treating her in the morning, I can't expect that she's going to notice very much.
At the very end I'll do some kind of bodywork. Most likely Shiatsu, which is what I have most of my training in, which is another name for acupressure. It's using your hands to do what you would do with needles. So it's needle-less acupuncture. It's using your hands to improve the blood circulation and to relieve tension in muscles so that the blood and the nervous system are working in the proper way.
