Acupuncture for Chronic Fatigue

Fatigue that has lasted months needs a doctor first. Ask your GP for blood tests — iron, thyroid, B12, coeliac screening, glucose — and mention snoring or daytime sleepiness, because sleep apnoea is common and treatable. ME/CFS is diagnosed after those are excluded.

If you are coming to Freshwater with long fatigue, the most important thing to know is how the appointments are run, because it is different from everything else in the clinic. They are shorter. They are spaced further apart, usually fortnightly rather than weekly. The needling is minimal — fewer points, less stimulation — and we ask you afterwards about the next two days rather than the next two hours, because in this condition the reaction is delayed.

If a session is followed by a crash, that is information and we reduce. People who have been through several practitioners are often braced for being told to try harder. That is the opposite of what happens here.

There is a local version of this worth naming. On the Northern Beaches a lot of people define themselves by what they do outdoors, and the hardest part of long fatigue here is not the tiredness but the losing of the surf, the run along the coast walk, the ocean swim before work. Pacing is not giving up on those; it is the only route back towards them that does not involve repeated crashes. We are ten streets from Balgowlah and about twenty from Manly, so getting here is short — which matters more than it sounds when the journey itself costs you something.