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.
Acupuncture for Overactive Bladder in Postmenopausal Women
If you've been treating pelvic health conditions for any length of time, you'll know that overactive bladder (OAB) is one of those issues that quietly dominates your patient caseload. Symptoms like urgency, frequency, waking multiple times a night might not make headlines, but they significantly erode quality of life for the women experiencing them. And for postmenopausal women in particular, the burden is disproportionate.
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.
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.