Acupuncture can address aspects of homeostatic balance that drugs alone don’t reach, explains Bonnie D. Wright, DVM, DACVAA, CVMA, CVPP, CCRT, CCRP.
Managing chronic disease often involves addressing one problem at a time: pain is managed, inflammation is suppressed, organ function is supported. Yet, many chronic conditions involve overlapping immune and neurologic dysfunction, with these systems interacting in ways that sustain symptoms as disease progresses.
In this video, Bonnie D. Wright, DVM, DACVAA, CVMA, CVPP, CCRT, CCRP, a veterinary anesthesiologist, pain specialist, and acupuncturist, discusses where acupuncture fits into chronic disease management. Rather than targeting a single outcome, Wright explains, acupuncture influences the crosstalk between pain signaling and immune dysfunction, addressing aspects of homeostatic imbalance that pharmaceuticals may not fully address on their own.
Below is a partial transcript, lightly edited for clarity.
dvm360: What makes a patient with chronic disease a good candidate for acupuncture?
Wright: Chronic disease often involves amplification of different homeostatic loops. In one case, many chronic diseases are accompanied by a pain component that develops over time, but there will also be other concurrent issues. And often, there's also an immune function aberration that occurs with chronic disease where we see low-grade, inappropriate inflammation in organs like the kidneys and the bladder, and so those pain conditions, and then those immune dysregulatory issues, happen concurrently.
One of the great things about acupuncture is that we know that it's very, very good for treating pain, but it also overlaps and treats a lot of immunologic dysfunction. And so, in the face of chronic disease, acupuncture fits in very nicely alongside the pharmaceuticals that help treat that particular condition, because it helps with some of that homeostatic balance that the drugs don't get to. And so, that can be both the immunologic side—because of that effect on the interstitium and the home of the immune system—as well as that neuropathic pain side that helps to feed those inflammatory cascades.
So, that crosstalk between the immune and the neurologic systems is specifically where acupuncture is working, whereas a lot of the pharmaceuticals we use for these are looking at a particular outcome of what that organ does. So really, in almost any chronic case—whether you're treating kidney disease, bladder disease, or recognized pelvic pain—the overlap of acupuncture is going to address multiple portions of that because of that effect on the neurologic and immune systems.