Treatment for Gastroparesis

Comment by Chad J. Dupuis, L.Ac.

You will be best served by finding an acupuncturist in your area who also practices Chinese herbal medicine and working with them for at least 3 months. There is no treatment for “x” symptoms/issues in Chinese Medicine. What Chinese Medicine is concerned with is your diagnosis in Chinese Medicine terms (essentially the western medical diagnosis/issue is functionally useless information) - see “treating the cause vs. the symptoms” for more on that.

As an example you can see on our IBS treatment page that there are 7 possible Chinese Medicine diagnoses (and these are just the main ones that I’ve had time to put in). Your treatment is based off of that diagnosis (again, not your symptoms) - so until you have a very clear diagnosis from a practitioner no one can really guide what possible formulas or acupuncture points to utilize as they will all be derived from that. Taking our acupuncture for abdominal pain treatment guide as another example, there are 8 possible underlying TCM diagnostic patterns (again these are just what are listed in that one document). The job of the practitioner is to listen to your entire medical history, perform diagnostic procedures such as tongue diagnosis, pulse diagnosis, possibly abdominal diagnosis, etc. ask relevant questions, start you on a treatment path, and then adjust as the responses to that treatment path dictate. It is a moving art/science, not a fixed entity like western medication is.

What you are describing is a fairly common set of issues and generally responds quite well to properly tailored treatment. So I would suggest you find someone in your area and work closely with them for a few months. If you are working with someone and they seem stuck, have them reach out to us and then we can discuss possible solutions with more technical terms.