Number of Needles Used in Acupuncture

Video Transcript

"SARAH HAUER: Hi. I'm Sarah Hauer. SIG HAUER: And I'm Sig Hauer, and we're professional practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine. SARAH HAUER: We're here on behalf of Expert Village. SIG HAUER: And welcome to our video. People can be concerned about how many needles we're going to use and that totally depends on what we see are the necessary areas that need to be treated and not just areas of the body but also areas of the spirit and the mind and the emotions. So that's going to determine how many needles we use. We could use--I've used as few as four needles. I've used as many as 30. Usually, I am using around 10 to 15 needles per treatment. Again, depending on what we see going on with that individual, we'll determine on how long we will retain the needles, and sometimes we may come into the room after five or ten minutes, and give the needles just a slight stimulation or some of the needles just a slight stimulation. And maybe five to ten minutes later, do that again but we may leave the needles as few as 15 minutes or as long as 45 minutes, again depending upon what we see the need for that particular individual. And another concern always is how many times am I going to have to do this? And my standard answer is, "I don't know." You can come to me and tell me exactly what's going on and I can figure out exactly what's going on, but everybody is very different. And that is very hard to gauge in just sitting down in 30 or 45 minutes in diagnosing a person as to how is that person really going to respond. That's a huge factor there that we are very different people. And another factor is what will that person do for themselves because as Sarah said earlier, we're going to talk about things about lifestyle, diet that affect a person and create some of these discomforts and disease and pains, et cetera."