| Acupuncture Pain Evaluation |
A good acupuncture evaluation should provide you with answers to the following questions,
which are specific to you as a patient.
1. Is the symptom treatable or responsive to acupuncture therapy?
2. If it is treatable, how many treatments are needed or require for you?
3. Will the symptom return after the initial relief is achieved?
4. When will the symptom return or relapse?
My method of quantitative acupuncture evaluation determines the healing potential of each
patient and provides realistic answers to these questions. Quantitative acupuncture
evaluation therefore allows me to predict the efficacy, duration, and prognosis of the
treatment plan.
I will be assessing your personal homeostasis or more accurately the potential for self-
healing from an acupuncture perspective. Any pathologic insult or disease tends to reduce
your self-healing potential. The impaired or declining homeostasis transforms the latent
energy (non-sensitive) acupoints into passive energy (sensitive) acupoints.
A healthy person maintains optimum homeostasis, which results in the best self healing and
produces a fast, complete cure of most pain symptoms. Such a person will have only a few
tender acupoints. I will evaluate your tender points at selected landmarks acupoints to
determine your current homeostatic level classification.
Patient classification is important to allow prediction of efficacy, duration and prognosis of
your treatment plan. When chronic disease or chronic pain is affecting the body,
homeostasis declines, the healing potential is reduced and the prognosis for therapy is also
reduced. Patients with chronic pain usually need 8 to 16 acupuncture treatments to achieve
pain relief. The same symptoms may return after 4 to 6 months and then need additional
treatments to keep the pain under control for another 4 to 6 months.
If homeostasis deteriorates beyond a certain physiologic limit, the mechanism of self-healing
is severely impeded. No matter how many treatments are administered these patients will
feel little or no relief.
My quantitative acupuncture evaluation is not meant to differentiate diseases or to
investigate the mechanism of diseases. The goal is to provide an evaluation of the self-
healing potential of a patient and the projected efficacy of acupuncture treatments. I will
need to complete a medical profile to differential your disease diagnosis, including standard
laboratory profiles, radiological studies and a physical exam.
What can be done to improve homeostatic level?
Traditional Chinese Medicine includes many herbal, vitamin, and homeopathic medicines
which can improve your personal self-healing mechanism. These may be included into your
treatment plan in order to facilitate an overall increase in your health status. The herbal
therapy is generally not designed to address the pain, although in some cases I will use
specific pain controlling substances.
The goal for including herbal materials in your treatment plan is to achieve an improved
homeostasis, what the Chinese have traditionally called “Balance.” Depending upon your
personal treatment plan the herbal therapy can be for a short duration, less than three
months or of a long duration, greater than three months.
What is the frequency of acupuncture treatments for pain control?
A successful acupuncture therapy should be administered with proper treatment “dosage”
and treatment timing. “Dosage” refers to the number of needles used in each acupuncture
treatment while timing refers to the time space between therapies.
For most healthy who are in acute pain, about 2 days are needed to facilitate the self-
healing mechanism between sessions. For weaker and older patients in acute pain the
timing between sessions is longer.
It is important to remember that your level of general health is an important factor in the
healing process. My goal is to provide relief from the pain and to increase your general level
of health at the same time.
Your healing journey requires participation from you in all aspects, from the formation of the
treatment plan to the carrying out of daily activities. You are an important part of this
healing journey and my active partner. Please feel comfortable in providing input, feed back
and suggestions as to how I can serve you better.
Darrell E. Samples, OMD, DNBAO, DNBIMA
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