Pelvic Care Blog
Our blog is dedicated to supporting acupuncturists who specialize or hope to specialize in pelvic health. We hope you enjoy our musings and offerings.
Can Acupuncture Actually Change Hormone Levels During Perimenopause?
Researchers pooled 36 randomized controlled trials and 1,480 perimenopausal women, comparing acupoint application, abdominal moxibustion, needle based acupuncture therapy and compression acupuncture against control for their effect on estradiol, FSH and LH.
Pelvic Care Is Landing in Toronto
Toronto, we're coming for you. A two day, hands on practical for acupuncturists ready to bring pelvic care into their practice. Palpation, muscle specific dry needling and treatment planning that closes the gap acupuncture school never taught.
Trauma Informed Care in Pelvic Acupuncture
In 2006, Pallavi Latthe and her colleagues at the University of Birmingham published a systematic review in the BMJ that pooled data from 122 studies and over 94,000 women. They were trying to understand what predisposes women to chronic pelvic pain.
pelvic Acupuncture Pricing
Most of the acupuncturists I know undercharge. Not by a little. By a lot. We undercharge in a way that no one in our profession quite says out loud, and we undercharge for reasons that are tangled up in our own relationship with money, our training, our gender, the cultural framing of our medicine and the belief that asking for money is at odds with being a healer. This belief lives in YOUR body. It shows up as the slight pause before quoting a price, the apology built into the sentence, the discount offered before it is asked for.
Why Do Some Postpartum Depression Patients Respond to Acupuncture and Others Don't?
A 2023 clinical trial out of Shenzhen followed 96 postpartum depression patients through 8 weeks of acupuncture and found something worth sitting with. The symptom improvement was real and clinically meaningful, a mean reduction of 5.31 points on the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, well past the accepted threshold for a clinically important change.
Three Mini Courses This Week Break Down Damp Heat Into What It Actually Is
Damp heat is a single TCM diagnostic name that actually covers three distinct clinical problems, discharge conditions, viral latency conditions and structural mass forming conditions, and most acupuncturists were taught to treat them all the same way. Next week The Pelvic Acu is teaching all three separately, live, free for the first 72 hours after each session.
How to talk to patients about Pelvic Acupuncture
A colleague asked me recently what I actually say when I bring up the pelvic floor with a patient for the first time. This is the resource I wish I had been handed in my first year of practice. The phrases I come back to. The ones that work in real rooms with real patients.
Why Pelvic Health Needs a Voice: My Conversation on Her Voice Shines
Dr. Krystal Couture joins Her Voice Shines to talk pelvic health, the care gap her clients fell into and why this work finally deserves a voice. Listen in.
How to Introduce Your Pelvic Acupuncture Services to Local Healthcare Providers
How do you actually get on the radar of the providers in your community? Not just the pelvic PTs. The OB/GYNs, urogynecologists, REIs, urologists, oncologists, midwives, doulas and pelvic chiropractors who are seeing the same clients you want to serve.
the transcare your clients cannot find anywhere else
Every body has a pelvis, and every body deserves a practitioner ready to treat it. Join the Chicago Pelvic Care Practical on June 20 and 21 and receive the Pelvic Health + Transcare Webinar free this Pride month.
Featured in Voyage LA: Closing the Gap, One Acupuncturist at a Time
The interview gave me the chance to say, in one place, the thing I have spent 19 years trying to say.
Someone nominated us for Voyage LA, and I still don't know who.
I got the note that The Pelvic Acu had been chosen for a feature, and I sat with it for a minute, a little teary, because someone out there decided this work was worth pointing a light at. If that someone is reading this: thank you. You have no idea.
We've Been Needling the Pelvic Floor for Thousands of Years
We have been needling the pelvic floor for over two thousand years. So here is the question I want every acupuncturist reading this to sit with: why have we let the pelvic floor become someone else's medicine?
Ashi Points vs. Trigger Points: What Research Tells Us About Dry Needling
As acupuncturists, we have been navigating a quiet identity question for years. A growing number of physical therapists, chiropractors, and athletic trainers are inserting filiform needles into muscle tissue and calling it dry needling. Patients are receiving the work. Insurance is increasingly covering it. And our profession has been left to ask whether what they are doing is, in fact, our medicine practiced under a different name.
Chicago Is Next, And I Want You in the Room!
Pelvic Care for Acupuncturists · June 20 + 21, 2026 · Chicago, IL
There is something that happens in the room when a group of acupuncturists comes together to learn pelvic care. I have watched it happen city after city. Practitioners walk in with nervousness that becomes curiosity, and by the end of day two, something has shifted. Not just in what they know, but in how they see the body, how they see their patients, and honestly, how they see themselves.
That is what I am bringing to Chicago this June.
What MSK just published about acupuncture and prostate cancer survivors
JAMA Oncology published a pilot randomized controlled trial out of Memorial Sloan Kettering's Integrative Medicine Service (major props to MSK for their work with cancer AND ACUPUNCTURE). The NOCTURNAL trial. Sixty prostate cancer survivors, mean age seventy two, randomized two to one to either ten weekly acupuncture treatments or a usual care waitlist control. Every participant came in with at least two nocturia episodes per night for the past month. Outcomes were measured with the International Prostate Symptom Score, the validated instrument for this work.
Vulvodynia
Vulvodynia affects approximately 7% of American women, yet many suffer for years before receiving an accurate diagnosis. This chronic vulvar pain of unknown origin, lasting at least three months, can devastate intimate relationships and severely impact quality of life. For acupuncturists treating pelvic health conditions, understanding vulvodynia and the growing evidence supporting acupuncture as an effective treatment offers hope to patients who have often exhausted conventional options.
FREE MINI COURSE: PUDENDAL NEURALGIA
At The Pelvic Acu, we’re passionate about teaching Pelvic Health and supporting YOU, our providers, as you bring Pelvic Care as a specialty into your acupuncture practice. That’s why we’ve created these mini courses. This month we are talking about PUDENDAL NEURALGIA.
Pelvic Bowl Ep5: Lindsey Lawson
Pelvic Bowl Episode 5 is live! In this episode, Dr. Krystal Couture of The Pelvic Acu sits down with Lindsay Lawson, a board-certified reproductive specialist (ABORM) and certified endometriosis specialist (I Care Better), to talk about the clinical overlap between fertility, endometriosis, fibroids, pelvic pain, and pelvic floor dysfunction.
Pelvic Care Grand Rounds: Collaborative Case Discussion for Pelvic Health Practitioners
Join Us For Grand Rounds on Feb 18th at 12:00 Noon. Recording available to all registrants.
The Spirit of Pelvic Health: Our Latest Podcast Feature
Pelvic health is so much more than anatomy, it’s a living dialogue between the physical body, our emotions, thoughts, spiritual journeys, and the deeper stories we carry.