A downside with playing sports or engaging in other physical activities can be the occasional injury, whether it’s spraining your ankle while out hiking, separating your shoulder making that diving catch, or finally getting out and playing that round of golf only to feel pain in your sprained lower back the next day.

Fortunately, the Eastern medical approach can be very useful in the treatment of these kinds of injuries and pain, allowing us to recover faster and get back to our activities.

In order to better follow this approach, it’s useful to understand how Traditional Chinese Medicine views health and injury in terms of the acupuncture meridian system.

Because much of ancient China was an agricultural society, many of the concepts pertaining to this meridian system were traditionally described as being like a network of irrigation channels providing water and nutrients to the surrounding farmland.

In a similar way, the acupuncture meridians of the body can be thought of as an interconnected system of pathways bringing energy, blood, and nourishment to every area of the body, both internally to the organs and externally to the bones, tendons, muscles, connective tissue, and skin.

With injuries such as sprains, strains, fractures, or other similar trauma, these meridians can also get damaged, with their flow becoming impeded.

In Eastern medicine, physical traumatic injuries can usually be classified under the 2 general categories know as “Energy Stagnation” and “Blood Stasis“, although in real life, most injuries tend to have aspects of both. (more…)