Pain and Inflammation and What to Do About It.

In Chinese medicine we call inflammation heat and sometimes damp-heat. So an acupuncture treatment for pain will almost always address inflammation. Inflammation usually occurs in acute injury as well as chronic injury and illness. For instance rheumatoid arthritis is diagnosed in our medicine as heat in the joints, or more specifically a general excess of heat in the body has logged in the joints. To fix such a problem you have to reduce the overall amount of heat in the body. You do this by finding and treating the root cause of this excess heat or inflammation. In something such as fibromyalgia excess heat can lodge in the muscles. So the advantage of Chinese medicine in these cases is that we are more likely to ask why? Why is there excess heat? If this question is not answered than we are really only treating the symptoms without looking for a cure.