Why Your Teenager Needs an Acupuncturist

By Erin Kennedy

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if every adolescent could have their own health guide that could help them to: 

• Develop body awareness, and mind-body awareness
• Regulate their hormones and menstrual cycle
• Balance their mood
• Improve digestion
• Reduce body pain 
• Manage migraines & headaches
• Reduce acne
• Improve sleep

Who wouldn’t want to help their teenager with these?  Especially considering the likelihood that any given teen could be suffering with one of many health conditions. 

• 31.9 % of adolescents experience anxiety disorders according to the NIH. 
• 14% of high school students in the United States have symptoms indicative of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), while 75% experience abdominal pain, according to this study published in the Journal of Pediatrics. 
• 33% of US teens are using hormonal birth control “solely to treat menstrual cramps” and other menstrual irregularities, according to a Scientific American article. This is despite “an association of adolescent [oral contraceptive] OC use and an episode of [major depressive disorder] MDD in early adulthood” according to this recent study published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. 
• 25% – 40% of children and teens experience chronic musculoskeletal pain (source).

Teens are in a transitional phase, often tumultuous, and developing a newfound independence. Their bodies are becoming more fully their responsibility, and for many teens, much less is shared about their experiences with their parents. It’s natural for them to snub the parental advice they’ve heard for a lifetime, and it can be hard to know what is fully going on with their bodies (they may not even know!). 

I started seeing an acupuncturist in my mid-twenties. And I often thought “if only I had known about this when I was a teenager!” I had already spent a decade silently suffering with digestive pain and menstrual problems that I thought were a normal part of life. Sports injuries had me accepting a certain amount of pain in my body. I was likely living with a functional form of anxiety that led me to be praised for my perfectionism.

By my mid-twenties, this gave me palpitations and chest tightness. I also had chronic pain from a car accident, and a realization that mental emotional stress seemed to make everything physically worse, which finally brought me to see an acupuncturist, particularly when this pain was dismissed by biomedical doctors. Through my treatments with an acupuncturist, I overcame all of these conditions, but I also learned a few life skills that had been missing. These lessons seem like they would be a gift to any teenager.

• How to pay attention to my body’s signals
• How to nourish and fuel myself properly, through diet and lifestyle
• How my physical health was connected to my psycho-emotional health 
• To trust my experience of my body, to expect a certain level of respect from health care providers, and to advocate for myself as a patient 

I love having the opportunity to share these lessons with patients at any life stage, but I’m always excited to treat teenagers and young adults because they are in such a transitional phase, and it feels like the earlier we can have an impact, the more suffering we can prevent. 

Think your teen won’t be into needles? We’ve found that most are able to handle treatments just fine. But we can keep needles to a minimum, or work through many other modalities. Younger patients are especially responsive to more gentle forms of treatment like acupressure. We can also use moxibustion (a form of heat therapy targeting certain acupuncture points), manual therapies like tui na, gua sha and cupping, and of course herbal medicine. 

If you’d like to find out more about acupuncture for a teenager in your life, just contact us at hello@fiveseasonshealing.com