How does acupuncture work for digestive issues?
After my last post, I’ve had a bunch of people ask, “How does acupuncture help digestive conditions like IBS, Crohn's, ulcerative colitis, constipation, and more?”
Acupuncture is helpful for all these conditions, and can also reduce generalized bloating, abdominal pain, and irregular bowel movements that aren't associated with any particular condition.
Basically, if you have any kind of digestive discomfort, it's likely that acupuncture can help! There's some fantastic research (multiple studies) that show acupuncture impacts the digestive tract by:
Regulating gastric motility, aka, how food moves through the digestive tract. Acupuncture has an especially strong impact on the motility of the stomach and colon.
Reducing inflammation of the mucosal lining (essentially the protective barrier) of the digestive tract.
Regulates GI sensitivity, i.e., abdominal pain, bloating, irregular bowel movements.
Impacts the brain-gut axis, which is essentially how the brain communicates with the digestive tract and vice versa.
My favorite research article on this topic is from the World Journal of Gastroenterology in 2015. It's a systematic review, which means the authors compiled all the known research (of high quality) on the topic of how acupuncture works for digestion.
If you want to learn more about the physiological changes that acupuncture brings about to heal your digestion, you can read the article here.
