Muscular Dystrophy pattern and treatment

So, first, there are no patterns per any condition even though that is how it is presented in text books and even on our site. There are only patterns - plain and simple. Treat the pattern and don’t worry about the western condition and you will get much further. You can help any condition with acupuncture, even if in marginal ways, most often, however, in broad and systemic ways when properly applied.

That said, the pattern diagnosis system does have weaknesses (my opinion) particularly in complex conditions, like muscular dystrophy, with functional and/or auto-immune aspects (i.e. where the body simply is having a hard time or just cannot do the right thing no matter how much you prompt it). The system we utilize, tam healing, was largely built for cancer and more complex conditions as that is largely what the founder sees; I worked with him for nearly a decade in my first years of practice and that was all I saw as well. To understand that protocol which would utilize acupuncture, tuina where appropriate and tong ren therapy (qi gong) if trained, read our tam healing and tong ren for muscular dystrophy page.

As for studies there are really none of any value published. This is largely true for the complete treatment of cancer, for example, with acupuncture and herbal medicine as well. This is not because there isn’t value with treatment, but treatment across the board isn’t there enough yet to ethically do studies that would entirely forgo any western treatments as a true comparison of results. There are many anecdotal studies, some published, that show mild improvements with either acupuncture and herbal medicine but they are, again, nowhere near comprehensive studies.

All that said, with our protocol, I have seen good results, but treatment is required over the long-term and relatively frequent (we do weekly or every other week in most cases). In some cases the causal factors are mild enough that you can accomplish quite a bit by aiding other parts of the body to compensate as much as possible (similar in some ways to stroke rehab) and then in other cases with strong causal factors you are easing the strain on the rest of the body from the genetic weaknesses, which is still quite valuable.