Acupuncture is a flexible system. Points for lower back pain, for example, can be found on almost any part of the body, including the face. Some areas, such as the outer ear, scalp, hand, foot include points for any place on the body. While finding points on the face is not a common practice, unless the goal of treatment is to alleviate facial pain, bels palsy, facial rejuvenation, or the points are effective for a specific treatment plan, it is possible to find points for treatment of almost any problem on or in the body on the face. At the same time, many health issues, such as allergies, eye and nasal problems, and even insomnia make the choosing one or more points on the face a good idea, and facial acupuncture is very often part of a regular acupuncture treatment.
Facial Rejuvenation Acupuncture NYC
During the last decades, facial rejuvenation has become widely popular, and some acupuncturists specialize in this type of procedures (Lee, Lim, Kim, & Lee, 2010). While acupuncture has always been used for cosmetic purposes during its long history, ancient needles were much thicker and were not nearly as flexible as are modern acupuncture needles. There was also a real danger of causing infections, and nobody wanted to have an infection on the face. Most acupuncturists nowadays use sterile, disposable needles made of stainless steel. Acupuncture needles are now available in various thickness—some are slightly thicker than a human hair—and acupuncturists take full advantage of these properties. For example, one of facial rejuvenation techniques is inserting acupuncture needles along the groove of each individual wrinkle, making it shallower and visually less noticeable, which would be impossible with ancient needles.
Facial Acupuncture in NYC
Ironically, many acupuncturists who were trained in the United States, where much of their training was devoted to western medical knowledge and skills, often follow ancient Chinese diagnosis and treatment recommendation even more than Chinese-trained acupuncturists. NYC acupuncturists are usually well-rounded and typically keep ancient classical acupuncture treatment recommendations in mind. (This may not be so with practitioners of western acupuncture, but even they instinctively notice changes in their patients’ facial complexion.) According to classical acupuncture texts, facial complexion should be analyzed as part of a diagnostic evaluation, and it should be done before and during every treatment (Zhao, Li, Li, Wang, & Liu, 2014), and certain changes in facial complexion require modifications of the acupuncture treatment strategy, depending on the observations and other findings (Fufeng et al., 2009).
Sources
- Fufeng, L., Dan, D., Xiaoqiang, L., Yiqin, W., Peng, Q., Xiaoyan, Z., & Guoping, L. (2009, August). Facial complexion acquisition and recognition system for clinical diagnosis in traditional chinese medicine. In 2009 International Joint Conference on Bioinformatics, Systems Biology and Intelligent Computing(pp. 392-396). IEEE.
- Lee, K. M., Lim, S. C., Kim, J. S., & Lee, B. H. (2010). A clinical study on facial wrinkles treated with miso facial acupuncture-measured by the facial skin photographing system. Journal of Acupuncture Research, 27(1), 101-107.
- Zhao, C., Li, G. Z., Li, F., Wang, Z., & Liu, C. (2014). Qualitative and quantitative analysis for facial complexion in traditional Chinese medicine. BioMed Research International, 2014.
