Source: TapInto New Jersey
TAP Into recently talked with Matthew Winke, an acupuncturist at Total Health Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Center in Berkley Heights.
80 percent of people seek acupuncture for pain relief. But it turns out that it can also be used to treat mental, emotional, and chronic disease issues. In addition, Total Health also provides a procedure known as cupping.
He explains, “Cupping creates a negative pressure on the skin and it pulls up all the muscles and tissues. What that does is it increases circulation into the muscle, and it also releases all the stuck tissue. And it actually detoxes the soft tissue — it pulls up any toxins in the muscle to the surface of the body, which allows the body to then flush it out.”
Cupping can even be used for the common cold: “We can heat the cups up, we put it over the lung point, and they help open up the lungs. Once people go through these processes, they feel so much better.”
Winke has seen a rise in patients during the pandemic. “Funny enough, at the peak of the pandemic, it was very busy, because people have been really seeking the acupuncture for the stress relief, because they’ve been cooped up in their house. They don’t want to get a massage because they didn’t want to have someone that close to them. So people can come in, get the needles in their body, they’re by themselves, they can relax.”
The body is weakened, after the virus, and the acupuncture will use certain points that boost the energy. “Or we can do points that help with the cough, the headaches, so we can actually give them relief, without them having to take some kind of pharmacological medication that could create more problems or more side effects.”
Winke has also seen many COVID patients that have had coming in with a lot of neurological problems. “COVID is creating brain fog, muscle aches, chronic cough — things like that. I’ve had a lot of success with acupuncture bringing the patient back to homeostasis.”
Another big reason why acupuncture is really popular is that it gets results with no harm done. After regular treatments, Winke said the patients feel completely different because “we’ve opened up the whole muscular structure, and we’ve regulated the nervous system with the acupuncture, and we’re just bringing people back into homeostasis.”
A typical session is about 45 minutes: “So you’ll come in, you’ll talk to your acupuncturist for about 15 minutes. Usually they’ll take your pulse — which tells the practitioner about the state of the internal organs. We also look at the tongue — we can do a lot of diagnosis with the pulse in the tongue. And that helps the acupuncture treatment along with prescribing herbal medicine.”
Acupuncture has worked for thousands of years, he says, and there’s a reason — “It works, and that’s why it’s catching on!”
Total Health is located at 492 Springfield Avenue in Berkeley Heights at 908.360.4984. Visit their Web site to learn more.