subject: Acupuncture To Stop Smoking - Does It Work? [print this page] For centuries, the Chinese have been using acupuncture to bring the body back into balance. Applying small thin needles of different lengths and inserting them into the skin at various depths and precise pressure points, practitioners claim that paths in the body are opened upto free energy and bring the body back into equilibrium. Traditional Chinese medicine has usually been used to reduce pain and distress but because the practice has become more widespread in the Western world, traditional doctors are using it as a supplement to other techniques in the treatment of various conditions and behavioral modifications such as losing weight and stopping smoking.
For as long as there's been acupuncture, people have been struggling with addictive problems. So can acupuncture be used successfully to treat these harmful habits? Can you quit smoking with acupuncture? The simple answer is yes. The difficult part is actually doing it.
Smoking and its related diseases are considered to be responsible for around 400,000 deaths in the United States each year and the estimated cost in health care reaches over $150 billion dollars ($150,000,000,000!) annually. These figures alone should induce people who smoke to plan to finish with it. But tobacco is a powerful habit and not so easy to eliminate. All the same, with the combined use of smoking cessation methods, you can stop smoking with acupuncture.
Using acupuncture as a complement to either prescribed or over-the-counter medications or techniques to quit smoking is attacking the issue from every direction. While one approach may be treating the addiction traditionally, acupuncture can reopen the channels and pathways in the body to allow for proper blood flow and energy to work on reducing cravings anddecrease the painrelated towithdrawal symptoms, thus allowing one to stop smoking with acupuncture.
The main thing however, might not be the specific approach used to give up smoking, but the act of giving up itself. It's long been recognized that cigarette smoking is awful for you. There are an estimated 4800 different chemical substances in cigarettes and - according to the Center for Disease Control - at the least 69 of these are considered as causes of cancer. Aside from these dangers to the smokers themselves, secondhand smoke, according to the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, accounts for up to 3000 deaths of non-smokers each year.
The methodchosen to stop smoking is less important than the quitting itself. Whether one chooses to give up smoking with acupuncture, go "cold turkey" or use prescribed medication and attend support groups, the goal is to get tobacco out of your life..
