James W. Osborne, MS, LPC Counseling Services
experiencing any significant improvement in symptoms. While of course it can take a series of treatments before improve- ments can be realized, I’m personally a bit impatient and expect results after one or two treatments in many cases. Since none of my long-haulers were noting improve- ments, some doubt started creeping into my mind. Serendipitously, during her fourth treatment one of the long COVID patients—I’ll call her Kelly—remarked to me how she just read an article based on the premise that the sympathetic nervous system (what controls the “fight or flight” response) may be involved with people who have chronic symptoms post-COVID.
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This premise made sense to me, con- sidering that one common thread I kept hearing from my long-hauler patients was a strange sense of anxiety. This was described to me not as an “oh my god, I had CO- VID-19” anxiety, but as a strange sense of unease, mainly experienced physically in the chest, and previously not experienced by any of the patients. In some patients, this anxiety persisted throughout the night, causing insomnia and sleep disturbances— again, in people who had no issues with sleep previously. With this information in mind, I targeted Kelly’s treatment that day toward helping regulate the autonomic nervous system, with a specific treat- ment aimed at decreasing the sympathetic nervous system activity while stimulating parasympathetic nervous system activity.
The day after this treatment, Kelly had probably the worst episode of post-COVID symptoms she had ever had, with a severe migraine keeping her bedridden for the en- tire day. When she started recounting this to me at her next appointment, my heart sank a bit; however, when she went on to say that when the migraine resolved, she felt better and more herself than she had since her active COVID-19 infection, my hope that we had actually made a break- through elevated.
Very often, patients with any issue will
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have symptoms worsen before they get bet- ter. That is exactly what I was hoping was the case with Kelly, but of course it was too early to tell. Sure enough, however, as she returned for her appointments over the next six weeks or so, the “COVID-19 migraines” remained at bay. By the end of our series of treatments, Kelly reported feeling the same, if not better, than she had before she contracted the virus.
Acupuncture as Long COVID Treatment
Kelly was not alone in her positive experi- ence with acupuncture. After I started using this nervous-system-regulating technique in other long-haul patients, similar break- throughs occurred—thankfully, with no one else having to suffer a major flare-up before experiencing relief. I was expecting acupuncture’s anti-inflammatory properties to be the main mechanism of relief; I was not expecting acupuncture’s autonomic nervous system regulating effects to be what really delivered.
I should emphasize here that this arti-
cle is in no way intended to claim evidence that acupuncture is an effective treatment method for long COVID. This was admit- tedly a very unscientific study, and I did not employ any sort of controlled methodol- ogy. Please take this article for what it is— the anecdotes of one starry-eyed acupunc- turist who was convinced that acupuncture could be an effective treatment option for long-haulers and emerged from that experi- ence even more convinced.
All of my patients in this “study” were also enrolled as patients in the long-hauler clinics within the conven- tional medical world. I was struck with how many different specialists they were shuffled off to, between the cardiologist, the pulmonologist, the rheumatologist, the neurologist, and on and on. While all of these specialists are of course essen- tial to work with, I strongly believe that acupuncturists should be added to that list when it comes to long COVID.
Matt Maneggia, LAc. is a licensed acupuncturist and the founder of Connecticut Family Acupuncture, with offices in Glastonbury and Coventry. As a board member of the CT So-
ciety of Acupuncturists, Matt advocates for increased access to acupuncture through insurance coverage and the integration of acupuncture into the mainstream health- care system. He can be contacted through his website at
CTfamilyacupuncture.com or via the main office at 860.633.6022. See ad on page 40.
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