Hello and welcome to Living in the Lehigh Valley, where our focus is your health and wellness.

I'm your host, Brittany Sweeney.

New acupuncture technology is available in the Lehigh Valley.

A Bethlehem acupuncturist is using it to pinpoint exactly where patients need treatment on their bodies.

These needles are sterile and they're so thin, they're very flexible.

Acupuncture.

The Chinese treatment of sticking needles into the skin is used for relief from many different ailments like pain, digestive disorders and anxiety.

It is where you take really thin needles and you insert them into parts of the body that are specifically believed to be the most influential over the energy that flows through the body.

Elise Garber has been practicing the ancient healing form for years.

Everybody's body has innate healing abilities.

So the acupuncture needles act as maybe little tuning forks.

If energy is not flowing freely, it'll help free up the energy and your body is actually doing the healing.

It helps put the body in a parasympathetic or rest and digest mode so that it can heal.

The acupuncturist currently sees patients here at The Calm Space, a holistic mental health facility in Allentown.

It gives people another means to try to just help release and work through their issues.

Lindsey Tomcics is the owner and a licensed therapist.

She says when starting her own practice, she felt the need to incorporate different forms of healing.

I've learned that not just counseling is enough at times.

So sometimes with individual therapy, you also need a little bit more, not just for the mind, but for the body.

So we offer massage, we offer Reiki as well as acupuncture.

So other means to help, you know, our bodies and our souls just kind of heal a little bit.

Tomcics says acupuncture gives people another way to release their tension.

Garber is now taking the practice another step by using technology to pinpoint exactly where patients need treatment.

The device is called an Accugraph and is a digital way to measure energy in the body.

It measures the energy pathways in the body.

And I use a little probe with a cotton swab attached to the tip and it's moistened and the patient holds another part of the machine and it creates a circuit.

So I'm just measuring the energy that's flowing through their body.

So I use points on the hand and points on the feet to get an overall head to toe image of the body, and then it'll produce a graph and it'll show what your overall energy is doing.

The measurements are recorded on your computer and then Garber can show the acupuncture process and treatment results over time to patients.

Looking at the graph helps me to determine which acupuncture channels or which pathways I might use.

Garber says her practice is one of the first to use the technology in the area.

I got it because I think that it would help my patients to understand in what's going on in their body and help understand acupuncture a little bit better.

And what we look at.

The acupuncturist has been practicing with needles for years, but just started using this technology in the spring.

That will do it for this edition of Living in the Lehigh Valley.

I'm Brittany Sweeney, hoping you say happy and healthy.