Eradicating Pain with Chinese Medicine
I treat pain every day at the clinic using acupuncture and herbs. Rather than focusing on pain management, we seek to correct and heal the underlying tissues that are causing the pain.
With acupuncture, I aim to improve circulation to the injured area. The needles are not necessarily placed at the painful site, in fact, most of the needles are placed elsewhere on the body.
A patient in his fifties came in for shoulder pain; he wasn't able to lift up his left arm without wincing in pain. To treat this, I applied acupuncture needles mostly to his leg shin muscle, and after just a few treatments, his shoulder was completely better. A short course of treatment was enough to overcome his pain because he was overall healthy and didn't have any other chronic ailments, and his illness wasn't severe.
With herbs, we can not only improve circulation to treat pain, but also nourish and strengthen muscles, tendons, and bones, and reduce inflammation and swelling. A patient in his twenties came in complaining of right lateral ankle pain. The right ankle was mysteriously swollen compared to the left side; he hadn’t sprained it nor had any physical trauma. From our time together, I deduced that the cause was coming from an internal imbalance. The pain was on the gallbladder acupuncture channel, and the function of the gallbladder is to help the body digest fatty foods. I asked him about his diet and learned that he tended to eating fried food often, especially late at night. I prescribed an herbal formula to support the gallbladder function, along with advice to cut out greasy, fried foods. His ankle pain was completely healed by the fourth day.
How fast you recover or your body responds will depend on how serious and chronic the pain is and how healthy you are overall. While a recent case of frozen shoulder took one month of almost daily treatments to significantly improve, with other chronic conditions like fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, and neuropathic pain, consistent treatments over a longer period may be needed as the underlying internal imbalance is much greater and more severe.
