The Chinese have borne witness to the benefits of acupuncture for thousands of years now, so there just might be something to it.
Coastal Point • SAM HARVEY:
Tess Iten in her Millville office.
Western doctors typically test medical treatments for effectiveness using “double blind” experiments, gauging the results of actual treatment versus “sham” treatment, or placebo.
That’s more complicated with acupuncture, because according to the National Institute of Health, placing a needle anywhere elicits some kind of biological response.
That makes it difficult to set up the placebo side to the equation.
Other westerners have trouble with acupuncture’s connection to ancient mysticism.
Based on the 12 Meridians of Chi (life force), the terminology surrounding the treatment originated in Taoist religion.
However, according to Tess Iten at Creative Wellness Acupuncture, it doesn’t take a leap of faith to see that countless people feel better after treatment.
“You don’t have to believe in it,” Iten pointed out — it just works.
Case in point, the effective treatment of animals.
While Iten focuses on human patients at Creative Wellness Acupuncture, over the past two years, she’s also visited clients’ homes to help their pets.
“They don’t have any understanding of acupuncture, but you stick needles in them, and there’s a change,” Iten pointed out.
Not to put too fine a point on it.
Most people ask for help with their pets’ allergies, or pain, but Iten recalled her effectiveness with a more serious case recently — a dog diagnosed with renal (kidney) failure.
Iten is a nurse as well as an acupuncturist. “That comes in handy, in a case like this, because having worked with people with kidney failure, I knew what to look for, and what to expect,” she said.
According to Iten, acupuncture reduced the dog’s symptoms of swelling. “He’s substantially better,” she said. “He’s really doing well.”
Iten allowed veterinary care would continue to be part of the pet’s overall therapy, but said the case was a good example of how her treatments can help.
“Acupuncture really complements what we would know as traditional medicine,” she pointed out. “The one works well with the other.”
She said acupuncture could even soothe emotionally traumatized pets, noting her treatment of one client’s pet trapped in a car following the owner’s fatal crash.
Iten said her practice with animals actually provided the impetus for Creative Wellness Acupuncture (on Cedar Lane, a stone’s throw from Route 26).
As Iten pointed out, “A lot of my clients with pets asked, ‘Well, do you do people, too?’”
Iten has 15 years in the acupuncture business.
Raised in Aberdeen, north of Baltimore, she studied nursing at the University of Maryland.
She went to work at an HMO after college — but there was always something different about Iten.
Her parents hailed from Europe (German mother, Swiss father), and they instilled in their daughter a sense for alternatives to traditional medicines.
“I grew up with — you might say, home remedies and other ways to heal things,” Iten pointed out.
She developed an interest in herbal medicines.
At the HMO, many of her coworkers used them as well, and conversations often gravitated toward that subject. Along those lines, the topic of acupuncture came up one day.
Iten said she’d never thought about it before. However, once the subject was broached, her interest piqued.
“Then I found out there was a school in Columbia (Md.),” she recalled. “I went to look into it, and really liked it.”
She earned her Master’s degree there in Columbia, at the Traditional Acupuncture Institute, after two-and-a-half years of study.
(She also has a certificate in animal acupuncture, and a Master’s degree in health care administration.)
Iten used her training to build a practice in southern Maryland (St. Mary’s County).
Over the years, she vacationed along the Sussex seashore, and made the move (to Clarksville) five years ago.
She’d been shopping around for places to rent or buy, and scouting the area to get a feel for what the locals might think of acupuncture. Iten happened to be back in the city, near the Pentagon, on 9/11.
In the days that followed said she’d come to ask herself, “What am I waiting for.”
Iten is still working as a nurse (commuting to Salisbury), practicing acupuncture part-time for now, but said she hoped to work up to full-time soon.
She said she planned to start offering seminars at some point, in an effort to educate people about some of the things they might want to consider using acupuncture for.
• Pain management — back, muscle or arthritic
• Emotional problems — depression
• Stress
• Lupus symptoms (inflammation, pain)
While medical problems may require traditional therapies as well, “Almost anything, acupuncture can help,” Iten stated.
“It brings harmony and balance to the system, and that’s usually why you have symptoms — something’s out of balance,” she said.
Patients can expect their first visit at Creative Wellness Acupuncture to last two hours.
“Of that two hours, we spend an hour to an hour-and-a-half just getting a history — physical as well as emotional,” Iten said.
“Acupuncture treats the mind, body and spirit,” she explained. “All of those, at one time or another, one or more can be out of balance, and so the idea behind the first session is — where do I need to start treating to bring you into feeling better and improving your health?”
After a half hour of acupuncture on the first visit, she said patients typically came back for hour-long sessions once a week, for six to 10 sessions.
“By that time, people are usually feeling much better,” she pointed out.
“I really spend time with patients, getting to know them,” Iten said. “It’s really a partnership between me and the patient, and the goal is to help them achieve wellness.”
For appointments at Creative Wellness Acupuncture, reach Iten at (302) 539-7489 or (302) 344-0933.