Your FAQs

The idea of putting needles in your body might make you feel faint, and I confess, I too was scared of needles! A needle-phobic acupuncturist? It’s true! But after many positive experiences, I obviously love acupuncture now. The majority of my practice is people who never have had acupuncture before! I pride myself in helping first timers feel totally comfortable and *surprise* turn their first acupuncture session into a relaxing and restorative experience.

We often think of medical needles when we think of needles, and those are hollow for injection or withdrawal of fluids! By comparison, 20, TWENTY! acupuncture needles fit inside a hypodermic needle! Acupuncture needles are sterile, disposable, hair fine needles that usually feel like a mosquito bite, or sometimes like nothing at all. And even that sensation should pass within a minute at most, and then you don’t feel them at all! Leaving you to relax and maybe even take a super restorative acu nap!

Alas, we do not. However, we can give you a superbill, basically a medical receipt that you can submit to your insurance for reimbursement. It has all the billing codes that your insurance company needs to reimburse you for your appointment. We accept HSA and FSA!

Your first appointment is 2 hours, so we can get to know you and learn all about your health concerns. We will spend the first hour talking about your health history, do an exam, take your pulse and look at your tongue and in the second hour you will receive your acupuncture treatment. Follow up appointments are 50 minutes long, however please give yourself extra time to recover and enjoy your treatment, so you don’t have to rush out.

Acupuncture is cumulative, so generally it’s not “one and done” however there have been a handful of patients that have experienced dramatic recovery from just one treatment! Generally, we want to see improvement every visit, with the anticipation that you might first experience a “healing crisis” where it initially feels worse before getting better. The importance in starting acupuncture is finding the right frequency of appointments so that every time you are noticing an improvement in symptoms: frequency, duration, or intensity. Otherwise, if you’re coming in to your follow up appointments with the same level of discomfort as your initial appointment, it is one step forward and two steps back, and you need to come more frequently. Conservatively I estimate that patients will notice improvement within 6-8 treatments.

During acupuncture your brain enters a theta brain wave state. Your body creates endogenous cannabinoids during acupuncture treatments! It is a mild sensation and won’t last all day. Enjoy, sit, have some water, journal about your experience, people watch from our third floor vantage point before heading out to the rest of your day!

Yes! We offer telemedicine appointments from a 30 minute herbal consultation video call to a full hour guided acupressure visit. During pandemic we began offering guided acupressure meditations to our patients and found that they received the same relaxing and supportive experience similar to an office visit. Let us support you wherever you are!

Many patients have asked me this over the years and I don’t have a short answer beyond starting to have a TED talk on Chinese Medical Theory! Ask me in person, and I will nerd out about Chinese Medicine, but really we don’t know. Western medicine hasn’t quite caught up with this over 3000 year old medicine. Scientists just discovered an organ that Chinese Medicine already knew about and called it the San Jiao or Triple Burner. Ultimately it is about the connection the needle makes in the body via the meridians that creates a shift in energy, creating more flow. I wrote a blog post about this topic if you want to deep dive!

Probably, yes! I can help you figure it out with a free 30 minute phone consult. Often patients have not experienced the relief they are seeking from their primary care physician and are uncertain if Chinese Medicine has solutions for them. And usually, the answer is YES!

Receiving an acupuncture treatment is relaxing! Acupuncture stimulates the theta and alpha brain waves, similar to being in deep meditation and deep relaxation. These deep brain wave states “promotes the body's natural healing responses and is also linked to anti-aging properties like preserving telomeres and slowing cellular aging.” Deep healing happens when we are in deep relaxation.