Traditional Chinese Medicine & Acupuncture in Burnaby

Crimson Door Healing offers Traditional Chinese Medicine and acupuncture treatments in Burnaby, near Vancouver, British Columbia.

Why Choose Crimson Door Healing for Acupuncture Treatment?

Working with Colleen works best when you want a partner in healing and staying healthy.

Many of her clients come from a background of knowing there is more that can be done to be healthy, but not knowing what that is or how to get it.

Many of her clients come from a background of old and new traumas that have impacted them physically or emotionally, and that continue to impact their day to day home life, work, and happiness. They’re looking for stress relief, anxiety relief…really, just relief, and to be listened to and understood.

They want better digestion, better sleep, less (or no) pain, stress relief, anxiety relief; they want to be in charge of their emotions rather than having their emotions run the show. They want to decide what to do each day rather than having their limitations decide for them.

Many of her clients lead comfortable, satisfying-enough lives, but know that they’re capable of feeling better, doing better somehow.

When she first discovered TCM, it seemed…different. Very different, for someone with no experience of this kind of healing. Now, after almost 15 years in practice, it seems like one of the gentlest, most sensible and easy to accommodate ways to get and stay healthy.

About 3 years ago, I was experiencing pain in my knee. I had gone to my family doctor and she had sent me for tests, she really couldn’t explain what was wrong with it as nothing showed up in the results. Then a friend recommended me to the one and only, Colleen. She worked on my knee, until there was no pain. Since then, she has been helping me with anxiety attacks, lower back pain, IBS, and numbness in my arms. I was being bothered by numbness in my arms, waking up 4-5 times a night. My family doctor said it was carpel tunnel and to wear a hand brace when I went to sleep. After a few treatments, with Colleen, it now bothers me on an average of 4 times in a 2-week period, and it keeps going down! I am getting married and moving to Abbotsford, Colleen has also helped me deal with all the anxiety that goes along with this. Colleen is committed to helping people. Her honesty is greatly appreciated at all times. When she is explaining something to you, she says it in a way that one can understand. Her sense of humor is very refreshing. Will I drive in from Abbotsford to have treatments, YES. Would I recommend her, YES, as she is the Fabulous Miss Colleen.

~M, Abbotsford

How Acupuncture Works

In Chinese Medicine, everything works together, so your emotions impact your body and your body impacts your day to day, and your day to day impacts your body and emotions. In Chinese Medicine, patterns matter, so you come in for a session and get to bring ALL of you in to the session. Colleen cares about how you feel physically and emotionally, and she’s excited to help you find the patterns that don’t work for you – and help you create ones that do. If you’re afraid of needles, if you love cupping, if you’re not sure why you’d want TCM formulas, she’ll find the best way to work with you, not give you a one-size-fits-sort-of-some solution.

Acupuncture activates acupoints and the meridians they’re a part of. Practitioners will tell you that acupuncture stimulates the Qi (basically, energy) in a meridian (sort of like a path through the body) and increases or decreases energy where it’s needed to create balance. Science has various opinions, arguing that acupuncture works through skin resistance, electrical resistance, activating the vascular system, or even that it directly impacts the neurology of a person.

Most importantly, though, in study after study, acupuncture keeps showing that it does work, whether or not we can find the English words to explain it. 🙂

What is Acupuncture?

Quite simply, the insertion of small (seriously, they’re really thin) needles in the body. Depending on the body condition, the angle and depth of the needle make a difference, and even the direction the needle is turned can impact the body.

Really, though, acupuncture is just a simple and gentle way to help your body heal itself.

How Acupuncture Helps

Some say it’s endorphins being released that allow ‘feel good’ chemicals to flood the system. Some say it triggers other chemicals that allow the body to heal. Some say that anything piercing the skin will send the body’s healing chemicals (white blood cells, platelets, and things like that) to that area. Some say it balances the electrical signals in the body. Some say it balances the lymph system.

An acupuncturist or TCM Practitioner will tell you the thing that covers all of the above and then some: acupuncture balances your meridians, which allows your organs, body, senses, and emotions to balance along with them.

Just for fun, this link is to a study on just TWO acupuncture points (Liver 3 and Kidney 3) looked at what changed in an MRI scan after needling these two points. They found “spontaneous neuronal activity, increased” in particular areas and decreased in others. They found that these points “specifically promote blood flow and activation in the brain areas related to vision, emotion and cognition, and inhibit brain areas related to emotion, attention, phonological and semantic processing, and memory.”

So whether you decide that acupuncture impacts the brain, the body, or the meridians, acupuncture allows your system to reset and work more easily.

Colleen practices Traditional Chinese Medicine, Herbology, and Acupuncture in Burnaby because it is a lovely, quiet area close enough to access from anywhere in the Vancouver area. Most importantly, however, she practices TCM because she loves it.

If you have more questions about the specific ways Colleen practices, there’s an FAQ here. If you’re curious about how Colleen applies Chinese Medicine and Integral Medicine to the work that she and Dana do with the Black Belt Mind, you can see some of how they work together here.