Did you know back pain is one of the most common reasons people see an acupuncturist.
Let’s focus on how acupuncture can help manage chronic back pain. Having several modalities to help manage your back pain is a great idea. Acupuncture can help in so many ways. Here are a few of them:
Reducing inflammation. Regular acupuncture treatment can reduce inflammation levels in your body. Many back pain issues are related to inflammation, so this is a great benefit! By focusing on the area of pain, in this case the back, we can focus the inflammation relief on that area, and this in turn can reduce the pain level.
Relieving back pain. Studies have shown that one of the ways acupuncture relieves back pain is by helping to block the neurotransmitters that send pain signals to your brain.
Increasing blood flow to the area. For some with back pain, it’s an injury that’s taking a long time to heal. Acupuncture around the area of injury increases blood flow to the area, and this in turn assists the body in healing the injury faster.
Decreasing stress and anxiety. This is kind of a passion of mine. If you have back pain and are also chronically stressed or anxious, your body’s reaction to that stress or anxiety might be increasing your back pain levels. Acupuncture is fantastic at helping your body better manage stressful situations, and reduce your anxiety levels by helping the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems become better balanced. In this way, instead of a stressful situation resulting in high anxiety levels, your body learns to get back to just dealing with the stressful situation and not immediately moving into anxiety to deal with the situation. In some situations with patients that have come in with both high stress and high pain levels, I have only treated the stress response, and the back pain levels immediately came down.
As always, if you have any questions about how acupuncture can help you feel free to call or email the office! And if you’ve been thinking about coming in, but haven’t yet, do it now!
Happy Acupuncture and Herbal Medicine Day!
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