What are gold acupuncture needles used for?

For those of your who are curious, “Gold Needles” are simply gold-coated needles: they have their normal stainless steel core, but on the outside, they are spruced up and coated in a bit of real gold! Dreamy, right?! We recently put them in our Instagram stories recently and got a number of questions – so here’s a little bit on these beauties that we so love to break out during a treatment!

It is important to know that gold needles are not at all necessary to perform a treatment successfully! They are considered to be an addition that can be utilized. Often such “additions” are really to harness the intention of the practitioner (more on this later too) more than anything else.

SO – you are reading this, and you see another wonderful acupuncturist who doesn’t use gold needles? Please don’t worry—you’re getting wonderful care for you when you’re working with a practitioner who has cultivated their acupuncture skills! As my dear teacher Ann Cecil-Stermansays in her book Advanced Acupuncture: A Clinic Manual, “Gold needles tonify… Stainless steel needles require cultivation on the part of the practitioner in order for the needle to effectively engage and direct the Qi.”

Here at Dragon Rises, we do not utilize a gold needle for a particular acupuncture point per se, but rather for an entire class of acupuncture channels. This class of channels is called the Eight Extraordinary Channels. They assist us in working on aspects of our body’s physiology that came to be during our early childhood — or the first cycle of 7-8 years of life. These channels are in many ways “extraordinary,” but one way to tell if you might want one of these treatments is if you have something you’ve “experienced forever,” or “for as long as you can remember.” Those are often two things we hear in a treatment setting that call to our hearts the Eight Extraordinary Channels.

Written by Melinda Iglesias Wheeler

Reference:

Cecil-Sterman (2012). Advanced Acupuncture: A Clinic Manual, p. 11