What is Biopuncture?
Biopuncture involves the injection of biological substances into skin or into muscles for the purpose of stimulating the body’s own healing process and a return to normal function. This is often to as autoregulation.
To help you better understand the effects of Biopuncture consider this analogy: if you never vacuum your home it will eventually become unlivable. If you constantly vacuum your home, you will get the same result — imagine a vacuum cleaner running 24-7! One function of your immune system, through the inflammatory process, is to vacuum up all the damaged tissue and debris in your body so that you can live normally. After an injury, it immediately sets to work and cleans and repairs the damaged areas of your body and restores you to normal functioning.
Unfortunately, for some, this process does not work as intended. In these people the inflammatory response is either too intense or for others, it is not intense enough.
An inappropriate inflammatory response can happen for many reasons: your injury is too severe; there is already a toxic overload and your body has now become overwhelmed; you are unknowingly or inadvertently reinjuring the same area; you do not have the necessary nutrients available for healing to take place; or the severity of your injury may have forced you to take a medication that shuts down the inflammatory response and your body is unable to get it restarted again. In this state, unable to carry out these tasks on its own, you need a therapy that helps you regain function and restore the tissue to normal.
Conventional drugs often suppress your symptoms immediately. That is their biggest attraction. It is also one of the reasons why you need to take high doses and repeat these doses as the effect wears off. Unfortunately, they are toxic and contribute to the overall toxic load on your body. They interfere with your natural inflammatory response and ability to heal. And, they do not encourage your body’s repair mechanisms. Instead they modulate only the mechanisms that decrease pain and function. As such, they often give you a false sense of improvement that can set you up for re-injury.
The goal of Biopuncture is to restore the normal function of your inflammatory response so that it can do the work nature designed it to do and that it already knows how to do without interference. Biopuncture treatments stimulate and support the body’s many internal mechanisms for healing, not simply shut off pain for short-term gain. Your injured tissue needs the beneficial effects of inflammation so that it can function on its own without the need for long-term treatment and care. But it needs just enough! To accomplish this, the tissue needs extra nutritional support to promote tissue repair and it needs the right information to tell it what and when and where to do the work and how much work to do. Biopuncture will support your body’s ability to perform all of these functions, but with much gentler signaling it will need a longer period of time to work in a way that meets the needs of your healing process.
Biopuncture is not a miracle treatment and it can’t resolve all of your medical problems. It can be used for pain in many areas including the neck, shoulder, elbow, back, hip, knee, Achilles tendon and foot. It can be used to treat osteoarthritis, sciatica, sports injuries, tennis elbow and golfer’s elbow. Biopuncture can also be used to address many other conditions besides pain. Some of these include: supportive therapy for general or organ-specific detoxification, allergy, asthma, migraine, tension headache, sinusitis, cystitis, bronchitis, and so on. The intention is to resolve the underlying problem not just the symptoms, so that the treatment is effective and long lasting.
Who may benefit from Biopuncture?
Many people can benefit from Biopuncture. Good candidates are patients who have tried conventional approaches but who have had no success or who have had to stop taking conventional medication because of side effects. Others who have had poor results from conventional therapies or who want to avoid surgery have found benefit from this approach. Patients who wish to avoid all these approaches and prefer a more biological approach will wish to consider Biopuncture.
But Biopuncture is not for everyone. It cannot heal you from cancer, diabetes, a heart attack, epilepsy, or AIDS and it is not appropriate for treatment when the disease is too aggressive or serious. It can, however, be used as an adjunctive therapy to other treatments to help support the immune system or decrease inflammation.
What is injected?
The substances injected are combinations of natural products that stimulate and support the body’s ability to regulate its own healing mechanisms. As such, they do not suppress or shut down the body’s natural healing ability.
Is the treatment safe?
There are few, if any, adverse reactions or side effects to the substances used in Biopuncture. The substances used for injection are made according to very strict quality control regulations. Most are manufactured in Germany, Italy, France and Belgium and conform to the rules governing the manufacture of pharmacological products. They contain very dilute concentrations of active substances so that toxic side effects are very unlikely. In this sense, they can be considered superior to some commonly used drugs such as NSAID’s which produce gastric upset and cortisone that can lead to diabetes and tissue necrosis.
Treatments are administered according to standards set by the Ministry of Health that involve correct injection technique and the use of sterile disposable material. You may feel fatigued over the 24-hour period following the injections as your body initiates a healing process; this is often a positive sign. You may develop a blue spot or mild pain at the injection site. These reactions are short-lived.
Do these dilute injections actually have an effect on the body?
The beneficial effect of these products is often denied because they are given in such low doses. And scientists have not yet proven exactly how they work. But research is under way and much more needs to be done. This is a challenge common to many therapeutic substances, both pharmaceutical and natural, as the mechanisms of action of many medicines have yet to be identified.
One study published in June of 2004 in the prestigious journal, Clinical and Developmental Immunology, demonstrated that the secretion of certain inflammatory mediators was modulated in a beneficial way by the administration of Traumeel® S a product regularly used in Biopuncture. The study demonstrated that one mechanism of the healing response works through the immune system by decreasing the immune modulators IL-β, TNF-α, and IL-8. You can read the results of this study at the following link: http://www.hindawi.com/journals/cdi/2004/820492.abs.html
Instead of interrupting mechanisms in the body that decrease pain and improve function, approaches that often produce side-effects, Biopuncture stimulates mechanisms that are available in the body that need to be put to work if true healing is to take place. The response comes from the body, not from the products themselves. The best response will involve improved local blood and lymphatic circulation, local and general detoxification, muscle relaxation, and tissue repair.
Where are the injections given?
The injections are given in carefully chosen spots and the locations are often just as important as the substances themselves. They are not as painful as many other types of injections because the needles used are very fine and the quantity injected is very small. Injections can be given under the skin, into muscles and ligamentous areas. Most people are surprised at how easily and quickly these treatments are performed.
How many injections will I receive?
Biopuncture involves the use of small doses of natural products instead of powerful drugs like cortisone. The length of time you have had a problem and its severity will determine the number and frequency of sessions you will need. This will be determined during an assessment. You may have complicating factors that have impeded your body from healing itself already and these may have to be addressed before or during the treatment process.
Usually several areas are injected during each session. If you have elbow, neck, hip or knee pain, injections may be made in the corresponding area and sometimes locations that are distant from the problem area need to be injected as well. These can include pain points, trigger points, and other areas of dense and sometimes painful tissue that contribute to the problem. Between 3 and 10 injections per session is typical.
How long before I heal?
Sometimes you will improve immediately after the first treatment. This is usually the case in patients with a fresh injury who already have a fully functioning capacity for healing. For conditions that have been around for months or years, healing needs more time to take place. Other aspects of your health may need attention at the same time. You may have several treatments before noticing any improvement at all or you may notice an improvement and then a worsening. This will depend on the tissue level and substances being used for any given treatment. Some people notice a worsening the day after the treatment and then a gradual improvement. In Biopuncture this is called the “reaction phase” and indicates that healing has started. For long-standing conditions, it is difficult to determine the number of treatment sessions needed and every case is different.
To schedule an appointment,
call 613-722-7684 or email reception@genesullivan.ca
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