By placing very fine needles at specific points, acupuncture sends a signal through your nervous system, fascia, and circulation — prompting your body's own regulatory intelligence to respond. Measurably, it calms the stress response, improves blood flow, releases your own pain-relieving chemistry, eases inflammation, and can even reshape activity in the brain. In classical terms, it restores the flow of qi and blood where it's become stuck or depleted. Both languages describe the same thing: helping the body find its way back to balance. Explore the research →

Acupuncture needles are hair-thin, and they're inserted gently and shallowly — nothing like the needles you're picturing from the doctor's office. Everyone experiences it a little differently, but most people feel only the smallest sensation on insertion, or a brief, dull heaviness we call the arrival of qi. Once the needles are in, most settle into a deep, easy calm — I lovingly call it being acu-stoned — a feeling of relaxation and wellbeing that often lasts for hours after you leave. Plenty of people fall asleep on the table.

Technically, all acupuncture is dry needling (the term just means any solid needle, as opposed to a hollow one like a vaccine or blood-draw needle). What physical therapists usually mean by “dry needling” is more precisely trigger point or motor point stimulation: prompting a muscle to contract and release. That can be a powerful way to make a tight muscle let go — but it isn't always necessary, and it can leave people sore.

More often, when I place needles and let them rest for a few minutes, your body processes the stimulation gently on its own — releasing tension, easing pain, and opening range of motion, without "jolting" your nervous system into overdrive. That tends to be a deeper, calmer kind of relief, with less next-day achiness. When a muscle does need a stronger nudge, I can add that intentionally — through manual technique or electrical stimulation — so we choose, moment to moment, when to push and when to let the work progress gently.

There's a reason I rarely release every guarding pattern at once, too: your body built those patterns to compensate for imbalances, and unwinding them too fast can leave you less stable, not more. (Relax every muscle around an ankle at once and it might feel wonderful — right up until you roll it on the walk to your car.) So we shift things strategically, one layer building on the next — the way you'd learn a tennis swing before you serve, or pizza-stop before you carve. It's also exactly why acupuncture and physical therapy make such a beautiful pair.

By blending motor points with traditional acupuncture points, I can tend both the muscular imbalance and the deeper, whole-body patterns beneath it — which is why the results tend to last. The research bears this out: trigger-point needling offers real short-term relief, and adding classical acupuncture as a supporting system helps those results hold, and helps people heal faster. As always, I'll draw on the right tools for the person in front of me.

Every treatment is tailored to you, and I draw from the full toolkit of East Asian medicine as your body needs it. Alongside acupuncture, a session may include cupping, gua sha, moxibustion (moxa), East Asian bodywork, or electroacupuncture — chosen to move stagnation, ease pain, warm and nourish, and support your nervous system. You'll always know what to expect before we begin.

It's a subtle distinction, and a meaningful one to me. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is the standardized system codified in China in the mid-twentieth century — streamlined, systematized, and often practiced in a more protocol-based way alongside conventional medicine. I know it deeply and draw on it often, especially where it meets modern research. Classical Chinese Medicine reaches further back, to the older texts and lineages TCM was distilled from — and to a richer map of the body's channels.

Beyond the familiar meridians, the classical tradition works with deeper pathways — the luo vessels, the divergent channels, and the eight extraordinary vessels — that hold our constitution, our deepest patterns, and the places we store what we haven't yet had the resources to process. Working with these channels is part of what lets us reach the true root of a pattern, and part of why this medicine can feel so quietly transformative — not only easing symptoms, but shifting something at the level of the whole person.

As a classical acupuncturist, I practice from those older roots: tending the root and the pattern rather than the symptom alone, and shaping each treatment around you rather than a protocol. Both traditions share the same origins, and both can be profoundly effective — the classical lens is simply the one that feels truest to how I understand the body: as an ecosystem, always in relationship with the rhythms of nature.

The short answer? Just about everything. Chinese medicine is a complete system of medicine, used across Asia for thousands of years to support a remarkably broad range of conditions — and it often shines most with the chronic, complex, or "nothing-quite-explains-it" patterns. If your case is complex, or you're simply wondering whether acupuncture and herbs are right for you, reach out before booking — I'm always glad to talk it through. Explore the conditions I support →