07/12/2025
🌿 “Helping the Body Remember How to Heal” … What’s Really Going On? 🧐
You’ll often hear phrases like “acupuncture helps the body remember how to heal itself”, or “acupuncture prompts the body’s innate healing intelligence”. They sound poetic, but they’re also rather vague, and can make acupuncture sound unscientific if left unexplained.
The body doesn’t forget how to heal. Nor does it have some mystical, conscious “healer within”. Processes like tissue repair, immune defence, and nerve regeneration are always running in the background. But sometimes those systems get stuck in maladaptive patterns: loops of pain, tension, or inflammation that keep the body from returning to balance.
☯️ Acupuncture works by modulating the body’s signalling systems – nervous, endocrine, immune, and vascular – and by influencing feedback loops so that homeostasis can be restored. In other words, it helps recalibrate how these systems communicate and self-regulate.
For example:
• When pain pathways are chronically active, the nervous system can stay “on alert,” maintaining a loop of tension and sensitivity.
• When the stress response dominates, circulation to the digestive and reproductive organs may decrease, slowing repair and function.
• When inflammation or immune activity is poorly regulated, tissue recovery may stall.
So, while “helping the body remember how to heal” is a poetic metaphor for reconnection, what’s really happening is a form of neurophysiological recalibration – restoring communication between systems that have lost coherence under stress. It’s less about reminding the body how to heal, and more about removing the static so its innate self-regulating capacity can function as it should.
The way our bodies maintain homeostasis across so many interlinked systems is extraordinary. It’s tempting to imagine a guiding intelligence behind it all, but that impulse can actually obscure the real marvel: nature’s awesome capacity for self-organisation through countless, intricate and spontaneous interactions. 😯✨
📞 01274 003 008 (call or WhatsApp)
📧 richard@ki-acupuncture.co.uk
🔗 https://ki-acupuncture.co.uk
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