Question Comes What is Acupressure Therapy? Let us first understand Acupressure – it is using the same principle as that of acupuncture. It is even called pressure acupuncture.
- What is acupressure?
- What are the benefits of acupressure?
- How can one become an acupressure therapist?
Acupressure is a safe and gentle therapy. Since it gets rids of your muscle pain, some diseases, and takes care of your body.
A skilful acupressure practitioner simply uses their thumbs and fingers to treat your problems, sometimes even their elbow.
What is acupressure?
Acupressure is a form of Chinese medicine. It focuses on channelling “qi” (life energy) into the 14 channels of our body. According to Chinese medicine, it is the constant flow of qi that keeps the body healthy. If any one of them is blocked, then it becomes difficult for the body to maintain its health.
Acupressure consists of the practitioner pressing the acupuncture points. The two practices are similar but during the acupuncture, the practitioner uses a needle. Acupuncture has the practitioner poke the needles into the patient’s body. In acupressure, their fingers are used to find that point and treat it.
On doing this, the patient lying can feel a slight bit of pain when the correct acupressure point is pressed.
On paper, acupressure therapy looks safer since it doesn’t involve us getting pricked everywhere om our body. Though there is a slight truth to the statement since acupressure therapy can be done anywhere. Hence, acupressure is preferred over acupuncture therapy.
What are the benefits of acupressure?
Acupressure helps with nausea and vomiting that a patient feels after surgery. There are low cases of patients vomiting and having nauseous behaviour when they have gone through acupressure therapy.
Back pain, fatigue, sad feelings, stress, tension can be cured using acupressure therapy. You might ask why sadness – studies show that certain points are linked with anxiety and sadness. So, by treating those you can feel better due to the acupressure therapy.
This isn’t just used on people who are coming out of surgery. But it is also used by physicians on their patients to get rid of the pain they are facing.
How can one become an acupressure therapist?
Multiple colleges and health care centres in India offer acupressure courses as a degree or a diploma. This is usually for 6-9 months, but one can even choose to do a postgraduate on this course. This is usually taken as an extra course by medical students since it helps them relax the patients post-surgery.
Take a Course on Acupressure
You can become an acupressure specialist by doing the Traditional Chinese Medicine courses including reflexology, massage therapy, acupuncture, etc.
You can even learn this course from home or on the internet. The institute you are learning from provides all the study materials for it like books, graphs, instruments, etc. The institute will teach you everything you need to know about acupressure. After the completion of the course, the institute also takes an exam. On passing the exam you are officially certified in the course by the institute.
What skills are required to become an acupressure practitioner?
Active listening skills
You need to have these skills to know what problem your patient is facing. With this, you can carefully diagnose their problem.
Communication skills
You need great communication skills to spread awareness about your clinic among the locals, through the mouth. You also need to keep talking with your patient to know if what you are doing is effective or not.
Attention to detail
This career demands great attention to detail since you are pin-pointing pressure points with your thumb and fingers. Attention to detail is mandatory – as you are doing something that requires you to pinpoint the problem with merely your hands.
Hard-working
You need to be hardworking if you are an acupressure practitioner. This field doesn’t immediately find traction unless you are a big name in the industry.
A pleasing personality
A person is letting you take control of his body for the next hour or so. You have got to have a pleasing personality otherwise no patient would willingly hand over their body to you.
Should be aware of the body senses
You need to be aware of the body’s senses. Since it helps you know if the pressure points you are activating are working or not. This usually helps you out when communicating with them isn’t going well.
Gain knowledge about the medicine involved
Since it is still a new field of medicine in the market, there are constant innovations in the field. You need to keep up with every single one of them in your field. You must keep yourself updated with the latest findings in this field.
How does an acupressure machine work?
You may have a basic idea of how acupressure works, but don’t know the pressure needed for it works. You can use these acupressure machines available on amazon to help yourself.
Even if you don’t know the points, you can still use it as it doubles up as a massage giving machine.
These machines are handy, they can be carried to all your trips if you have a chronic pain problem. These machines have thistles on the main head. These thistles aren’t sharp but blunt and comparatively bigger than the other normal thistles. The machine’s head is powered by a motor, which vibrates this padded thistle head.
On applying them on the right points you can feel a sense of unbelievable relief. The motors on the head are such that the vibration can be adjusted to a higher pace.
The only disadvantage of this machine is that it gets heated up quickly. So, if you can time your therapy sessions properly – you can avoid the heating up of the pad.
There are acupressure slippers available as well. As we know that our feet contain all the pressure points of our body.
The acupressure machine sector capitalized on this and created slippers that can give you the acupressure therapy by you simply walking. People aren’t able to apply the right amount of pressure when doing it by themselves, hence the bodyweight helps.
I hope you understand the techniques involved with acupressure now and their importance.
Should you choose this as a career path, you need to be very careful with where you apply pressure. Because you will be dealing with people’s medical problems and you do NOT want to worsen them.