Traditional Chinese Medical Treatment for Pain

I have been under care of a practitioner of TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) for five months now. The acupuncture treatments worked surprisingly well when they worked and sometimes they made the pain worse. Either way, needling does something. It’s not just placebo.

I’ve been on a regimen of herbs prescribed to enhance circulation in the body and especially the heart. My heart is doing strange things. All my life I’ve had a slow, strong, regular pulse in the low 60 bpm range. Now my resting heartrate is in the 80s and it’s irregular and uneven. My blood pressure is normal and unchanged. When I do HIIT (high intensity interval training), my pulse drops to under 100 bpm while I’m sprinting and then shoots up to over 180 (sometimes even 200) while I’m coasting between intervals. The heart rate should speed up to training range (145-155) while sprinting and slow down in between.

Perhaps I should get a Holter monitor even though there are no other symptoms of cardiovascular disease.

The herbal medicine doesn’t seem to be having any noticeable effect and the doctor said if the treatment were effective, I would feel noticeably better within a few weeks.