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Causative Factor in Five Element Acupuncture

Causative Factor

  • This approach to the practice utilizes the Chinese idea of the five elements that govern all aspects of life. These elements include wood, fire, earth, metal, and water.
  • Skeptics argue that physical pain and sickness are best treated through traditional means, although acupuncture can be fine for spiritual or mental treatments.


One of the increasingly popular alternative therapies and treatments for a wide range of disorders is acupuncture. If you’re considering acupuncture, you should learn about the causative factor, an integral concept in what is called Five-Element acupuncture. Below is an overview of this concept.

Understanding Five-Element Acupuncture

Before you can understand the concept of the causative factor, it may be useful to learn a little more about this approach to acupuncture. As you may already be aware, acupuncture was developed thousands of years ago in China. This approach to the practice utilizes the Chinese idea of the five elements that govern all aspects of life. These elements include wood, fire, earth, metal, and water.

According to this acupuncture style, each person is born with these elements. However, at some point in their lives an imbalance occurs with one of these elements. That imbalance is considered to be the source of the person’s health problems and the element causing the imbalance is considered to be the causative factor.

Determining the Causative Factor

When you have a first session with an acupuncturist from this tradition, he or she will need to assess your causative factor. According to practitioners, the causative factor can be determined because an imbalanced element gives off unique odors, colors, sounds, and emotions. The practitioner looks for these signs to determine the cause of your problems.

Once the causative factor has been identified, the acupuncturist devises a unique treatment plan for the patient. Because no two patients ever exhibit the same symptoms, no acupuncture treatment will ever be the same for any two patients.

Dealing with Physical Problems

Those who follow the Five-Element form of acupuncture often encounter people who do not accept that such an approach would be useful in dealing with physical illnesses. Skeptics argue that physical pain and sickness are best treated through traditional means, although acupuncture can be fine for spiritual or mental treatments. The Five-Element acupuncturist would disagree. He or she would claim that physical problems are manifestations of the causative factor in the same way that mental or spiritual “illnesses” are caused by that factor.

They would also point out that despite so many revolutions in medical science and despite sanitation and nutrition being so important in the Western world, the rate of illness still seem to be quite high. They might then argue that this means that traditional methods of dealing with these physical manifestations of the causative factor aren’t so effective.

The True Holistic Approach

Holistic medicine, which has become popular in recent years, is about treating the entire body, and nothing does that better than Five-Element acupuncture. By identifying the causative factor and treating the imbalance, an acupuncturist can bring all of the elements in the body back into alignment, which would help improve all aspects of the quality of life, including those elements of the body, mind, and spirit. Only through the identification of the causative factor can acupuncture work to improve a wide range of physical ailments and problems.

The information supplied in this article is not to be considered as medical advice and is for educational purposes only.