The Potential Use of Acupuncture in Long COVID Patients
By Matt Maneggia, LAc
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t may seem paradoxical, but very often the patients I feel most confident working with are those for whom conventional interventions have not helped. As you might imagine, a lot of folks who find their way into acupuncture offices have pretty much exhausted all other options. And very often, with acupuncture, breakthroughs are made where before these patients only found disappointment and frustration. Therefore, when the first cases of COVID-19 “longhaulers” were reported last summer, my interest was piqued. What struck me about these cases was how similar the symptoms appeared to other issues for which acupuncture is often so effective—in particular, chronic Lyme disease. My first patient with chronic Lyme disease was actually a family friend who came to me within my first year of practice (presumably, knowing me personally helped her overcome the trepidation of working with a newbie practitioner). To be honest, at that point in my career—without the benefit of years of experience under my belt—I wasn’t sure if I could help her. This patient’s main symptoms were brain fog, fatigue, and painful swelling in her knee. Curiously, although her symptoms would wax and wane seemingly at random, she knew that every autumn she was sure to have a longer and more severe flare-up.
I was admittedly quite surprised when she came in for her third or fourth treatment (during one of her autumn flare-ups) and reported that her symptoms had gone completely into remission. Objectively, what was at the previous appointment a swollen, red left knee was now a look-alike to her “normal” right knee. At the time, I had not yet come to realize the immense ability of acupuncture to spark the body’s own anti-inflammatory mechanisms. The Birth of a Theory Since that experience, I have increasingly felt that most of the difficult cases of illness and disease are due to some inexplicable, often unmeasurable inflammation in the body. When I started hearing about the COVID-19 long-haulers, with symptoms so often mirroring other “hopeless” cases that we’ve helped with acupuncture, I became impatient to start working with them. Over the winter, I put out word that I was looking to work with a handful of long-haulers on a pro bono basis. I wanted to do my own experiment, somewhat selfishly, just to see if my idea that acupuncture could be a useful treatment option for this brand-new condition was accurate. Pretty immediately, my “cohort” was filled.
Based on my experience with similarly strange presentations of inflammatory conditions, I determined that if acupuncture was going to help, we would know within about eight treatments. Since the effects of acupuncture are cumulative, it’s usually best to get treatments in closer together at the beginning, so with each new patient we scheduled them twice a week for the first two weeks. What struck me most in first working with these folks was the range of (often bizarre) symptoms each one experienced, and how different each case was—not only in terms of how they were experiencing the chronic after-effects of COVID-19 infection, but how they had experienced the infection itself. I was prepared to deal with the symptoms of “long COVID” that I had heard about in news reports—headaches, body aches, fatigue, and so on. What I was not prepared for was how uniquely personal each case would be, with symptoms ranging from insomnia to recurrent breast infections to spontaneous outbursts of sobbing in otherwise happy and well-adjusted people. The Start of the Study I will admit that my “experiment” did not start off promisingly. Had I bit off more than acupuncture could chew? After a few treatments, none of my patients were www.NaturalNutmeg.com
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