Dr. Nieters,
I heard about you through a friend and heard that you have past success in treating auto-immune diseases. I have a auto-immune disease called vitiligo where I lose pigmentation in my skin. I have been getting treated for this condition with light therapy at Kaiser for many years now with limited success, but recently, the condition has spread on my face, despite diligently sticking to my doctor’s treatment regiment.What type of experience do you have in treating vitiligo?
What kind of results have you seen?
What type of treatment is typical for autoimmune diseases?
How does your treatment help them?
Is the treatment mostly acupuncture or medicine-based?
How often would I have to come in for treatment?
How long is recovery time/ when should I start seeing some results?To aide you in answering some of these questions, here is some information about me:
Sex: Male Age: 23 Height: 5’6″ Weight: 135 lbsI exercise regularly. I don’t smoke, but drink on occasion. I eat all types of food, but have been recently trying to eat more raw fruits and vegetables via juicing. I don’t have any allergies other than to pollen. I don’t use any medicine other than topical steriods, which are applied to the affected areas of vitiligo. (Protopic and Fluocinide)
Thanks again for your help, and I look forward to meeting you in the near future.
Miles
Dear Miles,
I have treated a fair amount of vitiligo with very good results. The treatments in Chinese Medicine are pretty clear. The caveat is that most of my vitiligo patients have been women.
While I do acupuncture whenever I see my patients, most autoimmune, and internal medicine conditions in general, are best treated with herbs and lifestyle adjustments. Because of this I do not need to see typical autoimmune patients very often.
A great deal of my practice is treating autoimmune disorders. A lot of my patients fly in from the east coast or southern California, so I do not see them often. Ideal treatment frequency would be about every three weeks for the first 4-5 treatments to see what is most effective for you, and then every 6-9 weeks until the condition is resolved.
Vitiligo takes a little longer than most autoimmune conditions to see clear results because the cellular turnover takes awhile. Typically about 2-3 months. If no success by that time, it will likely not work. That being said, I have a couple of patients where we had some obvious improvement in a few weeks. I would not count on it, but it has happened.
I hope that this information helps.
Be Happy!
John Nieters, DAOM, L.Ac.
Doctor of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine
