Have you ever had Acupuncture or another traditional healing method?

Yes, I’ve had acupuncture.

There was a strain of influenza going around that kept people sick between 3 to 5 days. I developed the symptoms, got an acupuncture treatment, and was completely free of the symptoms within 24 hours without any other form of treatment. It worked on that occasion.

I will not give a recommendation for it, though. It’s not for everyone.

Nope.

My sister had it done and had a terrible painful experience. She gave it a try twice, really bad all around.

Most people I know see no improvement from it. One women I know who is just an acquaintance said it really helped her.

When I was pregnant, I was going through a natural medicine phase. I used a midwife instead of a traditional physician (and would do it again if I weren’t now high-risk. My main midwife was lovely and talented, and I refer friends to her often). My midwife’s then-partner took me over when Bea headed back to England for a few weeks to care for a family member who was near-to-term.

I was post-dates. Which normally, no biggie, but I ended up going a full two weeks past my due-date. In the week before the cut-off date (Florida law says only a licensed obstetrician can facilitate a birth that is two weeks post-dates), we tried everything under the friggin’ sun to jumpstart labor.

Homeopathics – Pulsatilla. Supposed to “encourage the baby into position”. Tiny sugar pills under the tongue. Whatever.

Acupressure – Nice foot massage. No contractions.

Castor oil – did what it said on the tin. No labor.

Moxibustion – This one takes the crazy cake. It’s a bundle of herbs that is burned, and the burning embers held over certain “acupoints”. Traditional Chinese Medicine. Got a first-degree burn on my ankle, still no labor.

Know what finally started my labor? Pitocin. Lots of it.

If I remember correctly, I was the assistant-midwife’s last case with Bea. What. A. Clusterfuck.

I tried acupuncture once for sciatic pain. It did absolutely nothing for me.

@Seek_Kolinahr Were you planning on doing the delivery at home initially? I thought midwives typically won’t deliver at home for a first pregnancy.

I’m glad FL has that law about overdue pregnancies. As much as I want women to have control, I want them to have control in an environment ready for a big emergency if it should happen.

Nature does the wrong thing all the time in pregnancy, labor, and delivery. Women get damaged, babies get damaged, and everyone can wind up dead. I have horror stories, I am sure everyone does.

I never intended to homebirth, though many women do homebirth for their firsts. I’ve never heard of a midwife turning down a homebirth for a first child if there were no warning signs of complication.

I was scheduled for a waterbirth in a lovely local birth center. My midwife was a certified Nurse Midwife with over 20 years experience, ten of which was as a trauma nurse. I felt more than safe in her care, and confident that she would be able to handle any emergency as necessary. The birth center was less than ten minutes from an emergency room, should any happenstance like a prolapse occur.

I’m nothing if not thorough in my safety precautions. ^_^

I think skilled midwifery care (emphasis on skilled) is an excellent choice for many women. My horror story is a happenstance of being a 5’ tall girl carrying a 10½ lb baby with linebacker shoulders. If he hadn’t been stuck behind my pelvis, we’d have been good as gold. It took pitocin to start my labor, but it was also being on pitocin for 37 hours that caused my haemorrhage. I can’t say why my body didn’t want to produce natural contractions, it just didn’t. There’s no way to predict that.

@Seek_Kolinahr I am all in favor of midwives as long as, as you say, there are no warning signs of complications. But, I worry about homebirths. Birthing centers I assume can handle many types of emergencies. The majority of the people who I know who had injury happen to their baby or to the mother was predictable-ish. The injuries were quite severe though.

One person I know, who is a doctor, his wife, who is a doctor, was doing rounds and began to suddenly hemorrhage. She wasn’t quite due yet. If she had been anywhere else but a hospital she would have died. Baby and mom wound up fine. Obviously that has nothing to do with choosing a midwife though. It was just an unfortunate emergency. They had no warning signs.

The homebirth midwife – unless the person is being incredibly stupid and only using a doula instead of a CNM – is going to bring with them a kit of emergency supplies, like common medications to stop haemorrhages. I’d have been screwed, because it took five different drugs before they found one that stopped mine, but in most cases, the CNM can get you from home to hospital without issue. And again, my haemorrhage was a direct result of (necessary) medical intervention in my labor. After 37 hours of max-dose of pitocin, my uterus was too tired to shrink down.

Because of the extremely selective screening process CNMs use in choosing clients, planned homebirths have about the same mortality rate as low-risk planned hospital births. The majority of transfers from homebirth to hospital are elective – Mom wanted that epidural after all.

There is one study claiming a high infant mortality rate for homebirths, but the methodology is a bit sketchy, because they include unplanned home-births – those “15 minutes in labor three weeks before your due date and the paramedics can’t get there in time” births. Either way, the mortality rates for infants are so low for both homebirth and hospital birth, the numbers can skew either way.

@Seek_Kolinahr interesting information. I’ve never researched it.

I have tried acupuncture. She did traditional Chinese, medical, moxibustion and cupping for me.

The cupping was for my back I was still having a lot of pain from my job and my previous injury of 3 herniated disks. As I normally go tense this allowed enough relief for me to strengthen my back muscles enough to prevent a lot of pain. Massage, they didn’t do enough strong enough in a session to be effective. I had also tried the cortisone shots and chiropractic, which helped for putting my back in place my shoulder was severely out of alignment and my feet were very uneven but after that was ineffective, until years later when I activated the old injuries and was having sciatic nerve pain in mainly my right leg. Then we did traction and I did a daily hike and haven’t experienced that horrible pain since.

Back to moxibustion I loved it. She did it on my toes and I always felt energized after that. Well acupuncture did that to me anyway but esp so. There was one point of my right hand that I especially liked her doing, I had stopped having periods I was always irregular but I had stopped completely after some time a month or so they started again and this was the most regular time of my life. And if I was having a tough time with it this point regulated my flow and made it easier. I now haven’t had a cycle in over a year at 27.

I now do reiki, I love it in some ways more then acupuncture. Maybe because for one it is free or two I am either more open to it or it is more interactive. And I can use almost all the methods ar home when I need a boost.

This has affected my moods, relieved anxiety, made me more relaxed and approachable, helped me deal with a lot of emotional upsets etc. It has even helped me relieve a lot of tension that builds up over day to day in my back and probably prevented another reinjury. We chose beforehand what I need to work on and its like guided meditation but I can feel an electrical current and vibrations I also experience temperature changes throughout a session. Sometimes rarely a session has brought me to tears and other times her. It is very interesting and always evolving. I find I over all have a higher tolerance to life’s big and small upsets, that I am warmer and more open as a person also it is easier for me to find humor in situations also I am less influenced by the need to be perfect or feel compelled to please everyone and have been better about speaking up for myself and less of a doormat. Overall I am more positive person
.

I freely admit that though these techniques help me a lot I often find myself telling me I should do practice daily at home or when a situation arises but I am not there yet.

I had a great experience with accupuncture for shoulder pain. I had the electrical needles and loved it! Crank it up, I can take it. haha
I had about 8–10 sessions over a few month period, but quit going because they were pricey, about $90 an hour at the time and even though I found it helpful and relaxing it was too expensive to continue. Now I just get massages. lol

Ooh, now if you’re juicing them, I can see that. I’m all about the TENS unit. That shit rocks.

@Pachyderm_In_The_Room DARN! Hurts me to hear you say that ‘cause I was gonna try acupuncture to ease my sciatic pain. The two 40 minute chiropractor visits were a waste of time…and I still got a bill for $440.00…!

It works for some people and not others, it can sometimes be a case of believing that it work or not

@Saboteur I was healed from that by traction at the chiro’s. I don’t know if I was just lucky but I do not envy your position. Best if luck.

This sort of thing happens all the time, especially in shoulder and knee operations. They normally fail the first time and then work the second, It is all really up to luck