A healing reaction is your body’s physical response to a healing stimulation. For whatever reason, when your body starts to heal, sometimes it needs to “unravel” troubles that it has accumulated over time. Not everyone experiences healing reactions, and most are tolerable, but we’ve noticed that there is a direct connection between the severity and number of previous stressors (whether its physical stress, emotional stress, or chemical stress) and the severity of the healing reaction.
Example: a person has terrible, debilitating migraines and has taken many medications for those migraines over many, many years. As the person receives a few treatments, suddenly (s)he develops a soft rash on the arm, which is the body eliminating the medication or what is left of the medication from all those years. The rash passes and suddenly the liver is functioning better as a result.
A little while later, suddenly the person has a burst of migraines that are similar to the usual but different in some ways and then for the first time in seven years, there is no migraine for two months.
Acupuncture harnesses the body’s ability to heal itself and it does whatever it needs to do, including detoxification, to get back on track. Healing reactions are a good thing, even though sometimes they’re not fun to experience.
Have you ever had any experiences that could have been a healing reaction? We’d love to hear from you!
Nothing in this document is intended as a substitute for your doctor’s diagnosis and/or treatment. This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA.
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