Acupuncture is great at reducing stress. Even our patients who seek acupuncture for fertility report reduced anxiety. One of the first things they often notice is that sleep improves and they experience reduced irritability. They feel more relaxed both at work and at home.

Until recently, we didn’t fully understand how acupuncture helps with stress, we knew very little about what exactly happens on the cellular level. Researchers at the Georgetown University Medical Center made a breakthrough discovery. It turns out that acupuncture interferes with the very mechanism of stress by blocking the chronic, stress-induced elevations of the HPA axis hormones and the sympathetic NPY pathway.