Her Patients Get The Point––

Practitioner Says Acupuncture Is About Healing

By Kaaren Valenta

When a local contractor hurt his back early in his career, he tried all the standard types of therapy. Nothing seemed to relieve the pain until he tried acupuncture.

“I wanted to be able to coach my sons’ baseball and football teams but I wasn’t able to do that anymore,” the 38-year-old Newtown resident said. “Then I tried acupuncture. It helped the most of anything –– nothing else relieved the pain. And it also relieved my asthma and bronchitis.”

The contractor is a patient of Jody Murray, a licensed acupuncturist, Chinese herbalist, and athletic trainer, who has opened a practice in Newtown at the Church Hill Physical Therapy and Sports Rehabilitation office at 30 Church Hill Road.

Ms Murray has been in private practice in Brookfield for six years, specializing in acupuncture for orthopedics, sports medicine, and gynecology. She started her career as a high school and college athletic trainer, but soon found that she was particularly interested in healing sports injuries. In 1997 she completed a three-year program at the New Center College in Syosett, N.Y., and became a board-certified licensed acupuncturist.

“I had worked in a physical therapy practice for many years but decided I wanted to pursue something that offered a more holistic approach to healing,” Ms Murray explained.

“Acupuncture is a healing art and science,” she said. “It is based on the ancient theories of traditional Chinese medicine [TCM], which views each of us as unique energetic beings, not a catalog of signs and symptoms. The goal of acupuncture is to strengthen and simulate the body’s own adaptive-homeostatic mechanisms.”

For that reason, acupuncture treatment is very individualized, she explained. A complete evaluation is done, and then a treatment program is designed for each patient.

“When I meet with a patient who complains of headaches, I try to figure out why the patient is getting headaches, and what type of headaches they are, before I tailor the treatment to that person,” Ms Murray said.

Acupuncture treatments involve the simulation of acupuncture points on the body with very fine, sterilized stainless steel needles that are disposed of after a single use. Specific acupuncture points are related to specific internal organs and body functions, Ms Murray explained.

TCM is the oldest continuously practiced medical system in the world. It is used by one third of the world as a primary health care system and has been endorsed by the World Health Organization of the United Nations. In the United States, it is a large component of alternative and complementary medicine and is a covered expense in some health plans.

TCM is used to treat a large number of complaints including headaches, allergies, asthma, chronic pain, back pain, digestive orders, chronic fatigue, addictions, menstrual disorders, infertility, sleeping disorders, and sports injuries.

“Acupuncture is known to have good therapeutic effect in a wide variety of diseases,” Ms Murray said. “Although pain moderation is an important application in acupuncture, it has much wider applications. It is generally considered to be beneficial for most functional disorders. It is not unusual to use acupuncture in conjunction with other therapeutic modalities and methods of supportive care. It can be used simultaneously with many traditional Western therapies. It can be especially useful in bridging the gap between medicine and surgery. In addition, it is compatible with many holistic approaches to care such as homeopathy and chiropractic.”

Although for some conditions one treatment may be all that is necessary, it usually takes a series of treatments. Typically acupuncture therapy requires multiple treatments; four to six is common. But often convincing signs of improvement will be observed after just two or three treatments, Ms Murray said.

Acupuncture treatment is not painful. Usually patients experience a variety of sensations, from nothing at all to a momentary ache or tingling.

Sometimes, like the contractor, patients come to an acupuncturist for one problem, such as leg pain, and discover that another condition, like asthma, also improves.

“This is typical of what happens,” Ms Murray said. “A patient comes in for one thing and finds the acupuncture helpful for another condition.”

A Fairfield resident who is in the process of moving to Newtown, Ms Murray received a bachelor of science degree in physical education from Springfield College in Springfield, Mass, and a master’s degree in exercise physiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was the head athletic trainer at the Canterbury School in New Milford and at Weston High School before joining Western Connecticut State University as an assistant athletic trainer.

For ten years she was assistant director at the center for knee care at HealthSouth Physical Therapy in Danbury, where she was responsible for all phases of rehabilitation and care of the athlete in an orthopedic setting. She is a nationally certified athletic trainer (ACT), a personal fitness trainer (NASM), and has postgraduate training in herbology and other areas of traditional Chinese medicine.

“Herbs are a variety of naturally found products that have medicinal properties,” Ms Murray explained. “Formulated into individual prescriptions, herbs often compliment the benefits of the acupuncture treatment.”

Jody Murray sees patients in both Newtown and Brookfield. For more information, or appointments, call the Brookfield office at 740-0020.