How Acupuncture Addresses the Root Cause of Chronic Illness
Many of the patients who come into my clinic arrive with the same story: They have an autoimmune diagnosis OR either chronic symptoms that don’t have a diagnosis. They’ve tried medications, elimination diets, supplements, functional medicine, and sometimes even acupuncture before.
And yet they still feel sick.
One of the biggest reasons for this is that most treatments—both conventional and alternative—are focused on managing symptoms rather than addressing the root cause of illness. From the perspective of classical Chinese medicine, the root cause of chronic disease looks very different from the way modern medicine defines it.
Chronic Illness Is a Sign of Severe Depletion
In Classical Chinese Medicine (CCM), chronic illness almost always points to severe depletion in the body. This depletion develops over time and can be caused by several factors, including:
Long-term emotional stress or unprocessed emotions
Diets that create excess heat in the body
Environmental exposures that generate internal heat
Years of depletion in the body’s foundational resources
One of the most misunderstood aspects of diet is the idea that cold or raw foods cool the body. In reality, diets high in raw foods, refrigerated foods, and foods that are difficult to digest can actually create heat, which creates what we often think of as inflammation, because they weaken the digestive organs that produces the body’s core resources.
Over time, these factors deplete what classical Chinese medicine refers to as “medium.”
What are you missing out on because of your chronic disease?
What Is “Medium” in Chinese Medicine?
The easiest way to understand medium is through a simple analogy. Think about the fluids in a car engine:
If a car runs low on oil, the engine overheats and begins to break down. The oil allows the engine to move smoothly and prevents damage. Medium in the human body functions in a similar way. It includes the fluids, blood, and energetic resources that allow the body to:
Keep organs healthy & functioning—problematic organs are a sign of mediumship depletion!
Maintain flexibility and circulation—creaky or painful joints and muscles area a sign of mediumship depletion!
Keep illness in a dormant state—when we have adequate mediumship, we don’t have symptoms!
One of the most important concepts in classical Chinese medicine is that pathology can exist in the body without causing symptoms. When the body has sufficient medium, it can hold disease in latency—meaning you feel healthy even if the potential for illness exists. But when medium becomes depleted, the body can no longer keep pathology contained.
This is when symptoms appear.
From this perspective, a Western diagnosis such as an autoimmune disease isn’t the beginning of illness—it’s the moment the body can no longer hold the imbalance quietly.
Signs That Your Medium Is Depleted
Many early symptoms of depletion are things people assume are normal.
Joint Pain
Dry eyes
Dry skin
Tight muscles
Chronic stiffness
Fatigue
In Chinese medicine, these symptoms often indicate depletion of fluids or blood. For example, tight muscles and restricted movement may indicate insufficient blood, which in Chinese medicine is not just a physical substance but also an energetic one. Modern diets contribute heavily to this depletion. Many people rarely eat foods that actually replenish fluids in the body like soups, stews, or porridges.
When I ask patients how often they eat these types of foods, the answer is usually “almost never.”
Yet these types of foods are essential for maintaining the thin fluids that nourish the body.The longstanding fear of dietary fat has also contributed to depletion, because fats are precursors for all of the body’s fluids (mediumship).
How I Identify the Root Cause of Chronic Illness
The most important question I ask new patients is very simple: “When did your symptoms begin, and what was happening in your life before that?”
I’m usually looking at the year or two leading up to the onset of symptoms, and very often we find that something significant occurred during that time and often that it triggered something that happened 20, 30, 40+ years ago.
Emotional stress
A major life change
Loss or trauma
Long periods of overwork or exhaustion
In addition to this conversation, I use dynamic pulse diagnosis, which is one of the most important tools in classical acupuncture—and sadly, a tool not taught in acupuncture schools.
Pulse diagnosis allows me to understand which level of energy in the body has been affected
This is a major difference between classical Chinese medicine and the modern system known as Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), which is what most acupuncturists are trained in today.
In TCM, treatments often focus on the surface presentation of symptoms, which means they may provide temporary relief but fail to reverse the deeper disease process.
Dynamic pulse diagnosis allows us to treat the level where the illness actually began.
How Acupuncture Restores the Body’s Balance
Acupuncture treatments send a message to the body to reorganize itself back toward its original healthy state. Each treatment is based on what the pulse reveals in that moment. Rather than following a fixed protocol based on symptoms, we treat what the body is asking for that day.
We often work with deeper channel systems—such as the divergent channels—that help the body:
Release stored pathology
Rebuild depleted resources
Consolidate the energy that remains
Treatment also includes conversations about the patient’s emotional and mental state. Chronic illness is often tied to patterns of thought or emotional states where someone feels stuck. When we shift the body’s energy through acupuncture, we can also begin to shift the mental patterns that keep someone trapped in illness.
Dietary therapy is another essential part of the process. Patients learn how to eat in ways that rebuild the body’s medium, including:
Consuming adequate fats, including saturated fats
Eating more warm, cooked foods
Including broths and fluid-rich meals regularly
Together, these approaches send consistent signals to the body that it is safe to release pathology and rebuild health.
How Quickly Can Chronic Illness Improve?
Another major misconception about acupuncture is that healing takes a long time. In my experience, that is often not true.
When treatment reaches the correct level of the body’s energy system, change can happen surprisingly quickly.
For example:
I treated a patient with alopecia areata whose hair began regrowing within three months.
A patient with Hashimoto’s symptoms experienced resolution in about nine weeks.
Patients with long-term migraines often see them disappear within four to eight weeks.
One patient struggling with severe chronic illness and suicidal thoughts experienced a dramatic shift in both physical and mental health within a week of treatment.
These kinds of results are possible because classical acupuncture treats the underlying imbalance rather than chasing symptoms.
Not All Acupuncture Is the Same
One of the biggest misconceptions about acupuncture is that all acupuncture is essentially the same. In reality, the medicine has many different lineages and systems. What I practice comes from a Daoist lineage passed down through generations, specifically Jeffrey Yuen, as I learned it from Ann Cecil-Sterman.
A significant amount of this knowledge was lost during the Cultural Revolution, and much of it is not written directly in classical texts but passed down through families. This is why two acupuncture treatments can look very different—and produce very different results.
Healing Chronic Illness Requires a Complete System
Treating chronic illness requires a complete approach, not isolated techniques focused on symptoms as has been becoming popular in the acupuncture world.
The Classical Chinese medicine, that system includes considering:
Pulse-based acupuncture treatment, if the patient is in-person
Channel system therapy
Dietary therapyEmotional and mental alignment
When all of these pieces work together, the body is given the resources it needs to restore its ability to heal. And when the body regains enough medium to hold pathology again, symptoms will resolve.
