Philosophy
The value and breadth of holistic medicine is that it looks at the person as a whole, not just as separate discrete symptoms or parts, but as one unified system.
Whatever your chief complaint is, whether it’s lower-back pain, infertility, or migraine headaches, this is the branch of the problem. The branch is the symptomatic outward manifestation of a deeper underlying internal imbalance, or the root.
We understand that the leaves and branches of a tree are the outward manifestations of its deeper internal source, the roots. We can trim the unhealthy leaves and branches, but if the problem of unhealthy roots remains unaddressed, then the health of the tree will not be restored.
The beauty of acupuncture is that it identifies and treats both the root and the branch of the problem.
In Western medicine, health care is broken up by specialists that only focus on their specific part. Your specialist may not see the relevance of seemingly unrelated symptoms, such as constipation, depression, or insomnia, but your acupuncturist will closely examine all these branches, in order to better identify the shared underlying root.