Before I went to acupuncture school I was a massage therapist for over a decade. All those years working on tight muscles has helped me a lot when I see a patient with pain related to musculoskeletal or sports injuries in my acupuncture office. To treat a patient like this I use a special group of points that we call “ashi” points. These are places in the body that hurt when you press on them. In my practice I find these “ashi” points by carefully palpating a muscle that feels tight. Then I gently place needles into that muscle and leave them for 15-20 minutes. In my experience the needles are highly effective at getting tight muscles to let go, and as soon as they do, the healing begins and the pain starts to go away.
I recently treated a cross country runner who had a case of shin splints that just wouldn’t get better. She could point to a very specific spot along her shin bone where the pain always was. My treatment included very careful palpation of the muscles in the area to determine which ones were involved. What I discovered was that the tight muscle was NOT right next to the area of pain. But it was clearly causing the pain. After only one treatment the patient made a full recovery.
Lately I have also treated a lot of peripheral neuropathy. This condition affects patients in a variety of ways. They can experience tingling, pain, numbness or other unpleasant sensations in their hands and/or feet. I have one patient who came to me because her neuropathy had caused her to lose the feeling of her feet on the ground. As a result, her balance was so affected that she sometimes felt afraid to walk. After regular weekly treatments for a couple of months she is now doing great. She walks with confidence and no longer has any uncomfortable sensations in her feet.
Another patient with neuropathy in his feet had so much discomfort that he couldn’t sleep, especially because the symptoms would get worse when he laid down. When I first met him he told me that when he was in the middle of a bad episode, which happened almost every day, he would stand up and grind his feet into the ground to relieve the symptoms. He called it his “dance”. After just a few treatments his symptoms improved enough that he was sleeping fine again. And this created a positive feedback loop that helped his condition even more. He is now doing so well that he can go for many weeks without having any episodes at all and he has been able to reduce his frequency of acupuncture treatments to once a month. Whatever the manifestation of neuropathy that a patient is experiencing, acupuncture helps to restore the movement of blood to the limbs thereby reducing pain and other uncomfortable sensations.
If you are struggling with any of these symptoms give me a call and we can discuss your situation and how acupuncture can help. And remember that acupuncture treats lots of different conditions! Check out my website at jessicafromuth.com for more information. Hope to talk with you soon! 207-776-9673