Chronic pain
We seldom give importance to minor pains and niggles, but once the pain starts getting worse, your quality of life is greatly impacted by it. Chronic pain is an exceedingly common condition impacting an estimated 76.5 million Americans. In fact, chronic pain can be extremely distressful. Chronic pain becomes a part of your life. You make changes and allowances for that pain as if it were another person who depended on your for its survival. Pain should be something that comes and then goes. It can be treated and resolved.
Chronic pain can be affected by many factors. One is age. The older we get, the more likely we are to have issues managing pain. It takes longer to heal after operations and treatments may not work as quickly as we’d like. Another factor is health. How healthy are you? When the body is not working at its best, aches and pains can turn into chronic pain issues much more easily.
Finding effective alternative therapies to treat chronic pain is increasingly important in an era characterized by skyrocketing opioid-related deaths. In 2015, there were 33,091 such deaths in the United States. Another factor that should stimulate the search for effective pain therapies is the growing elderly population. The percentage of those aged 65 years and older is expected to rise to 20% by 2050 in the United States. The incidence of chronic pain increases with age.
For millions of people who live with pain, acupuncture has emerged as a viable complementary treatment to conventional pain management. Acupuncture has been recognized as an effective treatment for chronic pain. It’s widely accepted among the medical community, and it’s pretty popular with patients as well. A recent survey found almost 3.5 million Americans said they’d had acupuncture in the previous year. Hundreds of studies support this, with more being released every day, showing conclusively that acupuncture for chronic pain is often far more effective than conventional treatment.
Acupuncture works particularly well on chronic pain such as
- Back and neck pain
- Osteoarthritis/knee pain
- Chronic headache
- Shoulder pain
It often reduces the incidence and severity of tension headaches and may prevent migraines. Adding acupuncture to your medical treatments may change your overall outcome.
One type of chronic pain that is often experienced is chronic back pain. All it takes is one incident to start you out on the road to endless back pain. Now, dealing with your pain is a more pressing issue. You search to find an answer that will end the nightmare. The ancient technique of acupuncture helps relieve chronic back pain better than standard care such as medications or physical therapy, according to a new study.
Chronic back pain has several levels. For some, it is a constant pain just above the buttocks that makes it hard to sit or stand for any length of time. For others, the pain may radiate down one or both legs. Any movement is labored. Chronic pain acupuncture has helped many people find a solution to their pain conditions that have plagued them for months and even years. Chronic pain can lead to abnormal patterns or disruption of functional connectivity in various brain centers. Those who have tried acupuncture notice a change in their level of pain, it increases functional connectivity. With successive treatments, pain relief is increased and some even return to a pre-chronic pain state of health. Through the use of acupuncture for chronic pain, the painless movement is slowly returned to the legs. There is minimal pain associated with the procedure. Once the needles are inserted, patients have reported feeling a warmth spread through their body and relax more, even dozing off during the twenty or thirty-minute session. Acupuncture for back pain has been shown to help provide significant pain relief for people with chronic back pain and other forms of pain that traditional medicine has not been able to help.
Acupuncture for chronic neck pain is effective in most of neck pain cases. For people suffering from neck pain or neck injuries like whiplash or stinger, this comes as welcome relief.
Chronic neck pain can arise for many different reasons, from osteoarthritis and degenerative joint disease to stenotic conditions where the pathways that the nerves travel through are narrowed. The body’s response to a chronic pain state is to increase muscle tone which begins to limit a range of motion leading to further complications.
We do try to alleviate chronic pain by following standard protocol like ice and heat alternatively, over the counter anti-inflammatory medications, physical therapy, and joint pain specific exercises that can offer relief from pain temporarily. But when the above methods do not help, then acupuncture is a possible option, along with your standard treatment, the next time you’re addressing chronic pain. Until the last few years, even many hardened skeptics and critics gave it a bit of a pass. The last two decades have seen “unprecedented advances” in the use of acupuncture to treat pain conditions, with a “rapid rise” in the number and quality.
Acupuncture for chronic pain works much like when you bash your elbow and rub it better. Bang ow, you bash you your elbow and begin to rub it better. Rubbing it better helps because the stimulation increases blood flow and circulation and stimulates the nervous system to release feel-good chemicals called endorphins to relieve the pain. Acupuncture works the same way but in much deeper and longer lasting manner. Through localized stimulation with acupuncture, you can increase blood flow and circulation to the painful area and eliminate the pain.
Traditional medicine in conjunction with acupuncture can accelerate the healing process. It can reduce the inflammation and swelling, and also provide you relief from conditions resulting from it, like stiffness and pain. Acupuncture can help you to cope with a demanding job schedule and keep at it without feeling under the weather.
Acupuncture has become more widely accepted in the western world. Americans are no longer accepting that prescription medications are the only treatment for conditions such as low back pain, knee pain, ankle pain, shoulder pain, leg pain, arm pain, neck pain, sciatica, and arthritis.
When it comes to chronic pain, most of the times it remains undiagnosed. Nobody can unravel the cause of the pain and the patients feel flustered as they do not get any relief from it and no amount of treatment can help alleviate the pain. In many cases, acupuncture has been successful in effectively unraveling the root cause of your chronic pain, and even when that is not possible, acupuncture helps improve the quality of life and is beneficial in reducing stress, fixing erratic sleep patterns, lifting and enhancing mood, and improving the life force as well. Acupuncture is well worth trying for pain management. Imagine this, if you are suffering and nothing is helping you, and there is this treatment, that can improve your condition, placebo or not, without any harmful side effects, you’d give it a try, wouldn’t you? So, try this holistic approach to pain management and get satisfying results!
If you are in chronic pain of any kind, be it from nerve pain, arthritis and more please contact us and let us help relieve you of your discomfort.