Hi, my name is Marlene Merritt and I’m the owner of Merritt Acupuncture and we are a full time Oriental medicine practice that’s located in Austin, Texas. I have the privilege of being able to work with my husband, Will Mitchell, who is also a practitioner of Oriental medicine here. And we have on staff here three acupuncturists, we’re also full time herbalists and we also have a massage therapist here. As you can see we also have a full pharmacy on site and we treat everything from cancer to the common cold. I’m here to answer questions about Oriental medicine, and if you have more questions please visit us on our site which is merrittacupuncture.com, and Merritt has two R’s and two T’s. So a very popular question is what is acupuncture and how does it work. Well, acupuncture is based on a completely different medical model than Western Medicine. It’s based on an energetic model which means that, for starters, the vocabulary tends to be different which is why the two camps seem to struggle a little bit when trying to speak with each other. But Chinese medicine is based on the understanding that energy should always be moving freely throughout the body and that when it gets stuck that’s when illness results. And so illness will come up with different symptoms and so when I’m talking to patients about this it’s almost a given that when people come in with something that they’ve had it for almost ten years or if you’re substantially older it might even be twenty. The way Chinese medicine look at it is that probably about ten years ago you had some energetic shift that if you were a very skilled acupuncturist you might be able to see that. Like you probably wouldn’t have any physical symptoms unless you’ve had this for awhile and a few years go by and you might have some symptoms that tend to be a little more fleeting. You know, things that don’t register on an x-ray is how I describe it. So you get headaches, or you get a stomach pain when you get stressed you know you have things that aren’t measurable. So usually the way medicine in Western Medicine, that’s not something you deal with a whole lot, so people just sort of hope that maybe it’ll go away or that time will go on. They’ll end up having more physical symptoms. They’ll wind up with a herniated disc or they’ll end up with an ulcer or they’ll end up with a tumor. And that’s when they end up going to see a doctor and this is you know what, ten years later or something like that. And the doctor, I always feel badly for them, because they always end up working with something and trying to shift something that’s now much more physical and ten years ago it was much more energetic and much easier to work with. So we work with people in all areas of that spectrum. We have people that come in with something very physical and we help them treat that as well as the root, which started, you know whatever period of time before. So being able to work with both of those allows the person to get better for the main reason that they are here as well as being able to get healthy and then be able to stay healthy which is really the focus of Oriental medicine, being able to keep people there. And that’s what we focus on.