Acupuncture Benefits After Your C-Section

After your C-Section, you’ll be experiencing an immense amount of pain, difficulty moving around, and general fatigue. Having a Cesarean section is no trivial surgery, even though almost one out of three new mothers have one nowadays, whether it be for health reasons or their own choice.  

Balancing having a new infant in your care along with healing from this procedure is no easy task, and should not be taken lightly. In fact, Chinese medicine calls postpartum the “forth trimester”, so you should use this time to help restore your body’s energy and health. It is recommended that the sooner you go in for treatment after your surgery, the better, optimally up to 5 days afterwards.  

The combination of both moxibustion and acupuncture can help to jumpstart the healing process, reduce the amount of pain you feel, and reduce scarring from your surgery.  

How Moxibustion Helps You Postpartum

By using moxibustion (the utilization of Moxa, a dried plant that is warmed and used to stimulate acupuncture points), your acupuncturist can trigger specific points in your body that will help to improve healthy blood circulation and aid in your recovery time of the surgical site, speeding up your healing both internally and externally.  

How Acupuncture Can Help You Heal Emotionally

Due to its effectiveness, in China, acupuncture today is used during c-sections along with anesthesia, and is done immediately after surgery. This is because, as previously stated, the sooner the treatment can be administered, the better. Acupuncture has also been shown to help settle the nervous system, allowing traumatic emotions to be processed, opposed to being blocked or sinking into a long-term pattern.   

Because of the wide range of emotions that many women experience during their recovery from their c-section, acupuncture can be vital to helping women “feel whole” again afterwards. Talk therapy can greatly help, while acupuncture can help with both mental and physical symptoms. This is especially common in mothers who were hoping to avoid going through a cesarean, only to find they need to after days of labor, or planned due to medical complications.  

Acupuncture And C-Section Scar Reduction  

Lastly, acupuncture can do a great job in reducing the scarring from c-sections. Although there is ample advice on how to regain core stability, pelvic floor strengthening, and postural advice out there, there isn’t as much in terms of healing your scar AND scar tissue (underneath the surface of the scar) for women. Restrictions in your scar (or adhesions) are known to cause pain, restricted movement, issues with digestion, and even possible problems with future pregnancies.  

Once your stitches are removed, collagen fibers form at the site of the wound, leading to adhesions being formed. Initially, this is important in binding the wound together, but because these collagen fibers are less elastic than your original tissue, it can cause issues in the long term, especially as they continue to lose their elasticity. It takes anywhere from 9 months to a year for the scar to heal entirely.  

If you’re going in to help reduce the scarring from your surgery, acupuncture will help to reduce its appearance both externally as well as internally. The needles help to break up the scar tissue fibers that formed under your skin that helped heal the wound after your surgery initially. The treatment also aids in the stimulation of blood flow to that area, which in term helps to release areas of trapped fluid. Continued and regular sessions will help to break down the scarring and allow your body to heal fully from your surgery in a completely natural and medicine-free way.