The Potential Use of Acupuncture in Long COVID Patients
By Matt Maneggia, LAc
interventions have not helped. As you might imagine, a lot of folks who fi nd their way into acupuncture offi ces have pretty much exhausted all other options. And very often, with acupuncture, breakthroughs are made where before these patients only found disappointment and frustration. Therefore, when the fi rst cases of COVID-19 “long- haulers” were reported last summer, my interest was piqued. What struck me about these cases was how similar the symptoms appeared to other issues for which acu- puncture is often so effective—in particular, chronic Lyme disease.
I My fi rst patient with chronic Lyme
disease was actually a family friend who came to me within my fi rst year of prac- tice (presumably, knowing me personally helped her overcome the trepidation of working with a newbie practitioner). To be honest, at that point in my career—without the benefi t of years of experience under my belt—I wasn’t sure if I could help her. This patient’s main symptoms were brain fog, fatigue, and painful swelling in her knee. Curiously, although her symptoms would wax and wane seemingly at random, she knew that every autumn she was sure to have a longer and more severe fl are-up.
t may seem paradoxical, but very often the patients I feel most confi dent working with are those for whom conventional
I was admittedly quite surprised when she came in for her third or fourth treat- ment (during one of her autumn fl are-ups) and reported that her symptoms had gone completely into remission. Objectively, what was at the previous appointment a swollen, red left knee was now a look-alike to her “normal” right knee. At the time, I had not yet come to realize the immense ability of acupuncture to spark the body’s own anti-infl ammatory mechanisms.
The Birth of a Theory
Since that experience, I have increasingly felt that most of the diffi cult cases of illness and disease are due to some inexplicable, often unmeasurable infl ammation in the body. When I started hearing about the COVID-19 long-haulers, with symptoms so often mirroring other “hopeless” cases that we’ve helped with acupuncture, I became impatient to start working with them. Over the winter, I put out word that I was look- ing to work with a handful of long-haulers on a pro bono basis. I wanted to do my own experiment, somewhat selfi shly, just to see if my idea that acupuncture could be a useful treatment option for this brand-new condition was accurate. Pretty immedi- ately, my “cohort” was fi lled.
Based on my experience with similarly
strange presentations of infl ammatory con- ditions, I determined that if acupuncture was going to help, we would know within about eight treatments. Since the effects of acupuncture are cumulative, it’s usually best to get treatments in closer together at the beginning, so with each new patient we scheduled them twice a week for the fi rst two weeks.
What struck me most in fi rst working with these folks was the range of (often bizarre) symptoms each one experienced, and how different each case was—not only in terms of how they were experiencing the chronic after-effects of COVID-19 infection, but how they had experienced the infec- tion itself. I was prepared to deal with the symptoms of “long COVID” that I had heard about in news reports—headaches, body aches, fatigue, and so on. What I was not prepared for was how uniquely personal each case would be, with symptoms ranging from insomnia to recurrent breast infections to spontaneous outbursts of sobbing in oth- erwise happy and well-adjusted people.
The Start of the Study
I will admit that my “experiment” did not start off promisingly. Had I bit off more than acupuncture could chew? After a few treatments, none of my patients were
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