One of the questions I often hear is, “Does acupuncture have side-effects?”

The honest answer is “Yes!” 

Here are three surprising side-effects of acupuncture…

1. Better sleep: Acupuncture balances your body’s nervous system to attune with circadian rhythms and promotes falling into deep and restorative sleep cycles.
2. Better sex: Acupuncture increases libido by balancing hormones (male and female), boosting blood flow to the genitals, and relaxing the mind with a flood of feel-good neurotransmitters including dopamine, oxytocin, endorphins, and serotonin.
3. Better relationships: Acupuncture relieves stress which allows for easy-going relationships with your friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances. It literally shifts the brain into a baseline state of relaxation so the daily annoyances, interruptions, and stresses of dealing with other people will bounce right off of you while you transform your mindset into cultivating healthy relationships at work, school, and (most importantly) home.

Are you ready to try acupuncture for your biggest health challenge and experience these beneficial side-effects?

​Schedule a consultation today! 

If you’ve ever been pregnant, you know there is a long list of things to avoid: paint fumes, ibuprofen, dirty kitty litter, sushi, tobacco, aspirin, caffeine, hot tubs, raw cookie dough, scuba diving….the list goes on and on.  So what can you do to cope with the stress, aches, and pains of growing another human? The answer is...

​Acupuncture!

The great news is that acupuncture is effective at treating ailments in every trimester of pregnancy. The most common pregnancy-related conditions seen in the clinic include:

• Morning Sickness
• Back, Rib and Hip Pain
• Headaches
• Sciatica
• Neck and Shoulder Tension
• Heartburn
• Hemorrhoids
• Colds & Coughs
• Fatigue
• Seasonal Allergies
• Anxiety
• Breech Presentation

When performed by a Licensed Acupuncturist (not a Physical Therapist or Chiropractor), acupuncture is a safe option for mamas-to-be to consider when looking for gentle, natural help with pain or illness. 

To find an acupuncturist skilled in pregnancy support, there are 3 important questions to ask:

• Does the Acupuncturist have experience with your specific condition?
• Does the clinic have treatment tables with adjustable backs to allow for reclined treatments?
• Does the clinic have pregnancy pillows to ensure proper positioning and comfort?

To schedule a consultation at Indigo Healing Acupuncture and learn more about how acupuncture can benefit your pregnancy, click the button below.

At Indigo Healing Acupuncture, we practice holistic Oriental medicine.

This means that we see living beings (human or animal) as a complete, interrelated entity composed of a mind (consciousness), physical body, and spirit (soul).  Holistic medicine allows healing to occur on physical and metaphysical levels.

So, what is holistic medicine in a nutshell? Holistic medicine…

• Sees a whole person, not a body part
• Focuses on wellness, not disease

How does holistic medicine differ from modern medicine?
Modern medicine aims to identify the condition (and affix a label such as “heartburn”) and alleviate symptoms with drugs, physical therapy, radiation, or surgery.

Holistic medicine identifies the root cause of the pain/illness and treats the mind, body and spirit to provide relief and a return to wellness.

How does this work in real life?
Let me give you a real-life example of a common complaint. Let’s say you have lower back pain, labeled by modern medicine as lumbar spinal stenosis.

Modern medicine will measure the pain, document the location, order radiological scans (x-ray or MRI), and prescribe pain killers, physical therapy, surgery, or rest. You’ll likely walk out of the 10-minute appointment with as much pain (maybe more if you had to wait two hours for your five minutes of face time with the MD) as when you walked in.

A holistic practitioner will see you as a whole person. We'll ask specific questions about where you live, what you eat, your emotional well-being, your exercise schedule, and the quality of your sleep. Within the framework of Oriental Medicine, we'll combine these answers with tongue & pulse diagnosis to identify the root problem of your pain and treat it with acupuncture, moxibustion, tui na, gua sha, cupping, and/or Chinese herbs. With this holistic approach, the acupuncture needles may not be placed on your back at all and you could still leave the appointment with no lower back pain! And, as a bonus, you'll likely be in a better mood & sleep better that night as well! 

Does insurance cover holistic medicine?
Many large medical insurance plans now cover acupuncture treatments for pain relief. Most employer-sponsored Health Spending Account and Flexible Spending Account (HSA/FSA) plans also include acupuncture as a covered service. Check your benefits summary for coverage details. 

Are you ready to be seen as a whole person and give holistic medicine a try?

This case study of insomnia is a real-life example of how Chinese Medicine is combined with modern Western medicine to create the best outcome for our patients.  This approach is called integrative medicine because it combines traditional holistic medicine with the science of Western allopathic medicine. 

Insomnia is generally defined as an inability to fall asleep, stay asleep, or a combination of both. Chronic insomnia is difficulty sleeping for a month or longer. Insomnia afflicts up to 15% of the world’s population. Insomnia occurs when the biological drivers of sleep, circadian rhythms and homeostasis, are disrupted by emotional upset and chronic stress.

This letter is an example of how we coordinate care with a patient's primary doctor:

Dear Primary Care Physician,
I have a patient suffering from chronic insomnia and would like your assistance with this case.

Case Summary:
The patient is a 32-year-old male with a chief complaint of restless sleep.  The history of present illness is insomnia difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep during the last six weeks. Sleep improves with daily exercise, is exacerbated by stress, crying baby, too much computer screen time. No night sweats, but sense of heat. Patient goes to bed at 11pm and is restless until 1-2am. He wakes 1x to urinate, usually between 4-5am. Vital signs are pulse 64 bpm, BP 118/68, 13 breaths per minute, body temp: 98.8 degrees F.

Based on the patient’s symptoms and tongue and pulse presentation, the TCM diagnosis is Heart and Kidney Yin Deficiency insomnia.

Evidence-Based Approach:
In a review study conducted by O’Brien & Weber (2016), acupuncture was found to regulate “various neurotransmitters and hormones, such as endorphins, serotonin, norepinephrine, adrenocorticotrophic hormone, cortisol, acetylcholine, melatonin, substance P, gamma-aminobutyric acid, and nitric oxide, known to be involved in sleep regulation. Acupuncture can also regulate higher cortical function, the HPA axis, and somato-visceral reflexes." 

Treatment:
The patient has agreed to receive a 60-minute Chinese Medicine treatment two times a week for four weeks. Reassessment will occur at the sixth appointment. Progress is tracked with the Measure Yourself Medical Outcome Profile (MYMOP) questionnaire. The patient completed the initial MYMOP prior to the first acupuncture treatment and will fill out a follow-up MYMOP questionnaire prior to the first appointment every week. An initial acupuncture point protocol was: 

• N-HN-54 an mian (peaceful sleep)
• Bilateral KD-6 zhao hai (shining sea)
• Bilateral HT-7 shen men (spirit gate)
• Bilateral SP-6 san yin jiao (3 yin intersection)

Acupuncture needles were retained for 25 minutes while the patient was lying supine in a quiet, darkened room.

The patient received the traditional Chinese herbal formula Tian Wang Bu Xin Dan (Ginseng and Zizyphus formula) with instructions to drink three cups per day in-between meals for four weeks.

​The patient is advised to avoid caffeine and alcohol, exercise in the morning (so as to not interfere with sleep in the evening), avoid spicy and greasy foods, drink water throughout the day and cease consumption by 8pm at night, and discontinue use of all electronic devices at least 30 minutes prior to bedtime.

Expected Outcomes/Prognosis:
Prior to his first acupuncture treatment, the patient identified insomnia with a MYMOP score of “6 - as bad as it can be”.  At his third appointment, he reported better sleep and a lower MYMOP score of "3".  I expect him to obtain more high-quality sleep within the next two weeks of treatment and report another reduced MYMOP score. 

​Referrals:
Please order a CBC differential lab test and Comprehensive Metabolic Panel (CMP) for this patient and contact me with the results.

​I appreciate your willingness to share in the care of this patient.

​Sincerely,
Michelle Wendt, L.Ac. DACM, Dipl. OM

What is brain fog?

Brain fog is an inability think clearly. You may feel spacey, have problems focusing on a specific task or feel mentally scattered with your thoughts jumping all over the place.  Brain fog can also cause forgetfulness, such as remembering someone’s name, what you ate for lunch yesterday, or where you left your keys.
​
How can Oriental Medicine help clear brain fog?

1. Acupuncture & Chinese Herbs improve sleep quality...
​​A lack of sleep at night opens the door wide-open to an invasion of brain fog. After a poor night of sleep, morning brain fog is almost a given. Acupuncture is proven clinically effective at treating insomnia, whether it’s an inability to fall asleep or difficulty staying asleep or restless sleep.  There are specific Chinese Herbal formulas for treating the root cause of insomnia too.

2. Acupuncture & Chinese Herbs relax the sympathetic nervous system...

The sympathetic nervous system controls the fight-or-flight response triggered by stress or trauma. It opens the airways, increases heart rate, and pushes oxygenated blood to the muscles. Think of it as the switch that tells the body to wake up. Acupuncture flips the off-switch in the sympathetic nervous system and allows the parasympathetic nervous system to take over. The parasympathetic nervous symptom controls rest and digestion. By shifting the body’s energy to slow down and focus on recovery, the mind calms down enabling more concentration & focus.

There are dozens of acupuncture points that calm the body-mind-spirit all the way from the head to the toes. There is a special constellation of four points on the head called si shen cong that translates to four spirit wisdom. The points are so effective at boosting memory & cognition that candidates taking national board exams are no longer allowed to enter testing centers with needles in si shen cong because it provides an unfair mental advantage!

3. Eat foods that increase cognition... 

One of the best foods to increase brain power are walnuts. When you look at a walnut, it actually looks like two halves of a brain!  Adding walnuts to meals throughout the day can keep your brain nourished & focused. Add them to your breakfast on top of oatmeal, enjoy them as a side dish or snack, replace croutons with walnuts in your lunch salad, and incorporate them into dinner in a dish like honey-walnut shrimp stir fry (replace the toxic vegetable or canola oil with healthy coconut oil, please!).  

Beans (black, navy & kidney beans) also bust brain fog! Try making a hearty bean soup with equal amounts of these three beans and season with a pinch of turmeric, dried thyme and fresh rosemary.

If you need a brain boost to-go, create a trail mix by combining walnuts, pine nuts, goji berries, pumpkin seeds & dried unsweetened blueberries. Yum!

If you’re lucky enough to have your local farm or market carry fresh quail eggs, eat 2-3 hardboiled quail eggs a day to improve memory and concentration.

4. Try natural alternatives to medications that cause brain fog... 

Many modern drugs (over-the-counter and prescription) can cause brain fog, drowsiness & metal confusion.

Chinese herbs offer a safe and effective alternative to many modern medications. When prescribed by a trained herbalist, there are usually no unwanted side-effects. There are over 100 ancient Chinese herbal formulas, each containing anywhere from 2 to 20 individual herbs that work synergistically together. Taking the right combination of Chinese herbs can dissipate daily brain fog in a natural way and reduce dependence on caffeine.

Contact Michelle for help clearing out your brain fog! 

​Do you have a sweet tooth? 
​Are after-dinner desserts sabotaging your waistline?
Do you want to stop smoking or drinking?
Are you seeking quick relief from anxious thoughts?
​
​Herbal medicine has a solution!

Sweet Change is a mouth spray that stops sugar cravings.  3-6 sprays three times a day is all it takes. 
It also calms the mind from anxious thoughts, which can help quit smoking and reduce alcohol consumption. 

​What more could you ask for?

Oh yeah, it's compliant with keto, paleo, and whole 30 plans. 

This magic potion contains these herbs:
​
Gymnema sylvestre (known as The Sugar Destroyer) has been used traditionally in Ayurvedic medicine for centuries.

• Helps abolish the taste of sugar 
• Helps manage sugar cravings and addictions
• Helps manage intestinal absorption of glucose
• Helps support healthy blood sugar & glucose metabolism
• Helps maintain healthy weight

Ku Gua 

• Helps reduce the amount of glucose released into the blood

Zhi Ju Zi 

• Helps eliminate withdrawal symptoms
• Natural liver detoxifier

Pei Lan 

• Supports digestion

Shi Chang Pu 

• Calms mind
• Clears brain fog

Contact Michelle to order Sweet Change.

Hey, are you...​

• Feeling stressed?
• Suffering from anxiety?
• Plagued by tension headaches?
• Tired of mood swings?
• Up all night overthinking and worrying?

Have no fear, Enlighten Herbal Elixir is now available at 
Indigo Healing Acupuncture!
 
What is it?
Enlighten Herbal Elixir is a hot beverage containing eight Chinese herbs.  The herbs work together to help relieve:

• Stress
• Anxiety
• Insomnia
• Mood swings
• Depression
• PMS
• Headaches, including migraine

 
What does it taste like?
Enlighten Herbal Elixir tastes good. It has a golden color and smooth consistency that feels great on the throat.
 
Still have doubts an Elixir made out of Chinese herbs can taste good? 
Over the past month, Enlighten Herbal Elixir has been extensively taste-tested and approved by one of my most discriminating patients… my two-year old daughter! She loves it and serves it up at her tea parties!
 
How do I know it will work?
This Chinese formula has been used for over 900 years. Western science has conducted clinical studies on its ability to treat the conditions listed above. For a list of clinical studies, contact Michelle and she’ll email it to you so you can see the evidence yourself. 
 
Why is it so hard to find?
Enlighten Herbal Elixir is currently farm-direct to only 150 clinics in the US. Indigo Healing Acupuncture is blessed to be one of those clinics! The Sichuan farm produces herbs in a sustainable manner, therefore quantities are very limited. All raw herbs are stored in humidity and temperature-controlled warehouses and the dried herbs are free from sulfur and sulfites. Thin Liquid Chromatography qualitative analysis and High Performance Liquid Chromatography qualitative/quantitative analysis are conducted on the raw and dried herbs to ensure the highest level of active constituents of the herbs are preserved. There is further testing to check for pesticide residue and heavy metals.  In short, the eight herbs in this elixir meet strict European Union standards for quality and potency.
 
Contact Michelle to find out if Enlighten Herbal Elixir is right for you!

I’ve always had “problem” skin. Red, painful cystic pustule acne plagued me until my late 20s. After years of anti-acne face washes, toners, topical antibiotics and astringent creams, I had it under control enough to hide my problem areas with just a little concealer.
 
When I was in my early 30’s, my acne changed from cystic to a plethora of small red papules on my forehead, cheeks, and chin. My dermatologist prescribed retinols and steroidal creams to reduce the inflammation. They worked a little, but my skin was still red, irritated, and bumpy. The texture of it made me very self-conscious as there’s no way to hide bumps with everyday makeup!
 
At the same time, in my early 30’s, I started waking up in the middle of the night like clockwork. It was always 1am when severe abdominal cramps roused me from sleep. Dripping with sweat, I would sit in the bathroom not pooping or passing gas, but just breathing and waiting for the pain to pass. The cramping would usually stop within 20 minutes.
 
After a few weeks, I made an appointment with my primary care physician. She ordered a CT scan of my pelvis, which revealed nothing. She recommended taking an osmotic laxative once a day to ensure the cramping wasn’t caused by constipation (full disclosure: it wasn't).
 
Flash forward another two years, and I was in my first year of graduate school for Chinese Medicine. I was receiving almost daily acupuncture treatments from my teachers and classmates. My chief complaint was chronic acne.
 
One of my teachers observed out loud in class that the redness and papules on my face provided a visual map of the Stomach meridian. That’s when a light bulb went on in my brain that illuminated everything… food was the cause of it!
 
I quickly purchased a copy of Robb Wolf’s book, The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet and devoured it in one day. The next day, I purged all processed foods and gluten from our family’s kitchen and started the Paleo lifestyle. As Robb recommended, I ate Paleo for 30 days.  A few amazing things happened:

• By day 2, I wasn’t waking up in the middle of the night with abdominal cramps.
• By days 5-6, my skin was clearing up.
• By day 7, I was thinking more clearly, almost as if a fog had lifted from my brain.
• By Day 14, I had lost 10 pounds, but was eating more. More real food.
• By Day 29, my entire face was clear and I knew I could never resume my old ways of eating a bowl of shredded wheat for breakfast and a sandwich on whole-wheat bread for lunch.

If you’ve read this far, then it’s time to acknowledge the biggest mistake I made about my health...

My biggest mistake was not listening to my body, when it was very clearly telling what was wrong! 

If I had listened, I would have saved myself years of unnecessary pain, sleepless nights, worry, stress, and embarrassment about my appearance. And money. I would have saved a LOT of money by not trying every acne treatment program I could find.

​My so-called healthy vegetarian diet was making me sick. Really sick. I had completely ignored all of my body’s warning signs. Even worse, I hadn’t realized the root of the problem… gluten-intolerance. I had eaten gluten all of my life, so why was there suddenly a problem now?
 
But the truth was, there were signs all along, I just chose to ignore them or call them something else.
​Like mistaking a face rash for acne.

Side note: If I eat gluten now (always by accident), I'll wake up in the middle of the night with those terrible abdominal cramps and wear a face rash for 3-5 days. 
 
The biggest takeaway from my story is that the human body is smart. Smarter than we typically give it credit for.  If something is wrong, physically or emotionally, it’s going to show up as what Western medicine calls a sign or symptom.

Be observant because the longer a sign or symptom is ignored, the louder(!) your body will demand your attention.
 
So, is your body trying to tell you something? Sometimes we all need an outside perspective to uncover the truth, the root of our health problems. Let’s work together to get to the root of solving your health mysteries.

Recommended Reading:

• The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet by Robb Wolf
• Against All Grain: Meals Made Simple by Danielle Walker
• Ready or Not! by Michelle Tam and Henry Fong
• Wheat Belly by William Davis, MD

A new shipment of Enlighten Herbal Elixir just arrived at Indigo!

​This ultra high-grade Chinese medicinal herbal elixir is farm-direct to only 150 clinics in the US.

Tastes amazing and makes Qi flow smoothly, diminishing pain and stress!

Improves sleep too!

One package is enough for a month of daily sips.

Only 20 packages remain today, they are selling fast! 

Order now by contacting Michelle!