Chinese medicine — including acupuncture, herbal medicine, and dietary therapy — is a complete system of health care that addresses both your symptoms and their underlying causes.
Unfortunately, a lot of the modern health care we get takes a one-size-fits-all approach, or just suppresses symptoms without actually helping you heal.
Chinese medicine embodies a deeper understanding of healing that encompasses the complexity and uniqueness of each situation, helps the body heal itself, and helps you learn to stay in balance and maintain a lasting state of health.
In order to heal, and then stay healthy, you need to do four things:
1. Understand what the problem is at its root.
It’s relatively easy to medicate symptoms, but the problem will just keep coming back unless you also address the underlying cause. Successful treatment requires an accurate understanding of where the problem is coming from, so that efforts to heal are on target.
2. Stimulate the body’s natural healing abilities.
Our own bodies have an incredible ability to heal that is with us as long as we are alive — if they didn’t, we would never even survive the small insults our bodies sustain every day. Many medications work by interrupting a natural process to relieve a symptom, or by replacing a substance in the body. Neither of these allows the body to take care of itself. Treatment needs to work with our innate healing capacities, not against them, to create real change.
3. Retrain the body back to health.
If a problem has been going on for a long time, the body may recognize the unhealthy state as the “new normal”, and keep returning to that state even if you remove the cause of the problem and develop very healthy habits. The body needs to be brought back into balance over and over so that it re-learns how to restore itself to a healthy equilibrium.
4. Learn how to maintain your own health over the long term.
Our modern lives have about a million ways of throwing us off balance. Even after we get better, problems can come back just due to the stresses of our everyday lives. It’s important to understand how your particular body tends to go out of balance, and learn how to adjust your eating, daily schedule, relaxation habits, and support system to keep yourself balanced and healthy over the long haul.
How Chinese medicine works
Traditional Chinese Medicine is a complete system of health care that addresses all four of these healing needs in a systematic, coordinated, step-by-step fashion to bring you back to a state of sustainable health.
- Your treatment plan is based on a detailed, individualized diagnosis that takes your whole body and mind into account (not just your symptoms). This strategy is updated and adjusted each time you come in, based your response to the previous treatments, improvements in your health, and any other changes.
- Treatment is designed to stimulate the body’s own healing mechanisms, and allow the body to recalibrate and correct itself. Acupuncture points are chosen based on the underlying imbalance or pattern that is causing the problem.
- Over time, your body re-learns how to do this on its own. The effect of acupuncture and herbal medicine is cumulative, and results are usually better and longer lasting with each successive session. Improvements generally remain stable even after treatment is finished.
- Chinese medicine also provides dietary and lifestyle advice to help you take care of your health over the long term. Advice will be specific to your diagnosis, and help you understand your body’s patterns and tendencies. This allows you to make changes that increase the effectiveness of treatment.
What we offer as your practitioners:
Our role is to be your guide through this process. We work with you to understand your body and the causes of your health issues; to keep track of your progress and adjust and refine our treatment strategy; and to support you in making any changes you need to make.
We offer our expertise based on extensive study of Chinese medicine. Both Marilyn and Sharon are graduates of the New England School of Acupuncture, a comprehensive three-year Master’s Degree program that encompasses both Eastern and Western medical studies.
In addition, Sharon has completed several internships in orthopedic acupuncture and has studied pain science at Tufts University at the Master’s level; Marilyn has four years of post-graduate, advanced herbal training with Sharon Weizenbaum, as well as several years of teaching Chinese medical diagnosis, treatment planning, and case analysis at the New England School of Acupuncture.
We have worked with hundreds of people like you, sorting out the real-life complexities of their conditions and accompanying them on their journey back to health.
Our treatments are gentle, attentive, and tailored to the unique needs of each individual. We combine different styles of acupuncture, heat therapy, herbal medicine, dietary therapy, and lifestyle counseling to achieve the best results for you.
Learn more about the treatment process.
Find out which conditions can be successfully treated.
For more detailed information about our background and credentials, please visit Sharon‘s and Marilyn‘s bio pages.