These are not only causes of pain. It is important to know cause, and not just blindly attempt to relieve symptoms. Otherwise, ineffective treatments could be due to a missed diagnosis. Also, we may approach pain from a vertebral problem differently than we do pain of unknown origin.

Rating Pain & Measuring Progress For each pain location, I have patients rate severity on a scale of 1-10. A "10" would be worst pain possible, like giving birth or a kidney stone. Once we know degree of pain for each site, we can assess how much acupuncture treatment changed it. It's nice when there's an immediate improvement of 20-30%, or even 100%, which happens in some cases.

Sometimes, patient can't reproduce pain on table because of posture, so we have to wait until treatment is over. If possible, we can needle so that measuring progress is easier. For example, if your pain is worse when walking, we can needle your hand (this is distal needling- needling away from site of pain- another topic entirely) while you walk around. Then we can tell immediately if we're on right track or not.

Complementary Pain Management At same time, you may do other therapies. You might be looking into surgery, or other solutions- for example, than is a synthetic knee injection for people with very little knee cartilage. The synthetic fluid lasts for several months.

Interestingly, researchers have found that back pain does not always correlate to changes in spine. They've found many people with vertebral problems that have no pain at all, and that some people with constant pain have no obvious structural changes.

To me, this underlines primacy of nervous system. Your brain interprets and creates nerve signals. Sometimes pain has to be "unlearned." This process may be accomplished with acupuncture alone, or in combination with counseling, meditation, or hypnosis.

In some situations, physical rehabilitation is indicated. Specific exercises prescribed by a trained physical therapist may help you regain strength and function in affected part of body. You may also avail yourself of slow, demanding, and healing movements of Taichi.

The Process of Pain Control For some people, pain goes away immediately, and they are otherwise healthy. In that case, their partnership with acupuncturist may come to an end.

But, others are stuck with chronic pain, and need continual treatment to experience a better quality of life. In these cases, it may be better to see acupuncturist every other day for concentrated therapy- we're more likely to shift body's neurological patterns that way. If that doesn't work, acupuncturist may help you purchase a microcurrent or tens unit- these are electrical stimulator pads that you can use at home (or, in fact, anywhere) to keep pain at bay. The pads are applied to specific points according to theories of Chinese medicine.

For those whose pain is cause or greatly influenced by emotional and mental factors, Chinese medicine can recommend dietary changes and new emotional habits. Taichi and meditation can have a normalizing effect on nervous and immune systems as well.

A couple other sensations that we don't want are shooting electric feeling if we hit a nerve, or sharp feeling of being to close to a vein. Neither does much harm. The worst that happens is you get a small bruise in area. We never get any residual effect from hitting a nerve. You should tell acupuncturist if you feel electric or sharp sensations, and they can change location or direction of needle. These are rather rare occurrences, though.

Basically, acupuncture is very comfortable, and what little temporary discomfort might occasionally occur is more than made up for by its relaxing and healing effects.