In western medicine, autoimmune disease refers to about 80 different illnesses ranging from Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, fibromyalgia runs the gambit. Oriental medicine provides a unique diagnostic tool to the vantage point of autoimmune conditions. But before we get there, about 24 million people in the United States are affected by autoimmune conditions and most of those are women.
The cause of autoimmune diseases is considered to be unknown. Treatment is considered primarily to be non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, like Aleve, Advil, Motrin, and immunosuppressants. Why would we want to seek a better treatment than nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories and immune suppressants? Primarily, because both of these can be hard on the body.
OLISTIC 
And when we’re talking about autoimmune conditions, we have a body that’s already in a deficient impaired state. So non-steroidal anti-inflammatories have been shown to cause ulcers in the small intestine within seven days of taking them and healthy volunteers. And immune suppressants, well, they suppress the immune system. And right now, and always, the immune system is one of the most important parts of happy, healthy, functional living.
Research has shown that acupuncture can assist the body in self-regulation of the immune system. The results of a study on anxious women showed that the most favorable effects of acupuncture on immune functions took place 72 hours after the treatment, and they persist for a full month after each session.
The same studies show that impaired immune functions in anxious women. So, chemotaxis phagocytosis, lympho proliferation, and NK activity were significantly improved by acupuncture. And augmented limited parameters, like superoxide anion levels and lympho proliferation of the patient subgroup whose values had been too high or significantly diminished. So good gets Gooder and bad gets less.
Acupuncture brought the above-mentioned parameters to values closer to that of healthy controls, exerting a modulatory effect on the immune system. Further, another thing that the study demonstrated is that acupuncture facilitates the migration of cells to the endothelial layer, which is the skin towards the side of infection.