I have severe but remitting lower back pain, with spinal stenosis and disc issues. Physiotherapy has been less than useless, and pain meds help somewhat but of course there are side effects, some unacceptable (I’m looking at YOU Lyrica!)
My job entails sitting for around 7hrs per day, which just exacerbates the pain…but I HAVE to work, I don’t have the luxury of being able to quit.
So, wanting anecdotal stuff about your experiences with acupuncture, and how it might have helped/hindered your back pain issues.
My brother in law is an acupuncturist. He has treated me for mild pain before. It kinda worked, or the pain subsided by itself - who can tell which?
I don’t follow any form of woo, but I am humble enough to know that I, and science, don’t have all the answers. Try and and see if it works for you. It’s not expensive and the only downside could be wasted time.
Well… It kinda does. The caveat is that the studies which showed it works also showed that it works no better than poking the general area of the pain with a finger. So kambukta may want to start with having someone poke the area with a finger.
If you want acupuncture to work, you’d better stop reading in a thread full of skeptics. It’ll erode your belief and diminish any placebo effect you might get. Crap! You shouldn’t even be reading this post.
Pixel Dent is right. Go see a physical therapist. I did maybe a dozen sessions last year because I kept hurting my ankles while running and he fixed me right up. By which I mean he assigned me a ton of core/lower body exercises and, through diligence and hard work, I was able to address the problem.
There are no easy fixes when it comes to musculoskeletal pain.
Oh, and make DIY foam roller. There are instructions all over the internet. They are medieval torture devices and they are wonderful. But wait until your physical therapist teaches you how to use it.
kambuckta, is there an ergonomic specialist available at work? It seems to me that having your work setup evaluated would be a reasonable accommodation to your problem.
We’ve recently been asked if anyone would like a standing computer setup and I signed up for it. Would having one available help?
This is a timely thread, as an internists’ organization has just released a set of recommendations for dealing with back pain, one option being acupuncture. At the same time, not everyone is impressed.
From the standpoint of someone who has had back issues and is trying to help a close relative with sometimes severe chronic back pain, there are limits to what exercise/ergonomics/heat/massage/physical therapy can do, but physicians (including those wary of medical board scrutiny over pain med prescriptions) would rather you try those before going to pharmaceutical or surgical options.
Yeah, I’d have to regard this advice similarly. I would rather opt for an intervention that works whether I believe in it or not. In the case of acupuncture, I am :dubious: about a modality where sticking needles in non-chi points (or doing sham acupuncture where the needle doesn’t actually enter the skin) work as well as the “real” thing.
There isn’t anything about acupuncture that COULD help with spinal stenosis and disc issues - other than the placebo effect. And if you are going for that, I hear jellybeans, just the red ones, work great for back pain.
In the US, at least, Physical Therapists are more and more employing a technique called “dry needling”. It is similar to acupuncture in that both require insertion of a small needle to certain points in the body with the goal of reducing or eliminating pain and speeding healing. The difference is in the theory behind choosing insertion points. Acupuncture needle placement is based on “meridians” and changing energy flow, while dry needling placement is based on neuromuscular knowledge and “trigger points”. In other words, dry needling involves inserting small gauge needles into the point(s) causing pain - much like massage therapy targets muscle “knots”. The difference of course is that unless your masseuse is Chuck Norris, the fingers stay outside the body. Dry needling reaches into the muscle.
Dry needling, unlike acupuncture, will rarely be offered as the only course of treatment. It will be incorporated into a full treatment plan along with manual manipulation and exercise.
Full disclosure: the technique is still somewhat controversial in that the benefits have not yet quantified via double blind studies, but the idea behind it is rooted in science.
Hah, thanks all. I am not quite up to date with the latest in research and must have misremembered hearing that acupuncture was now considered a somewhat effective treatment somewhere along the way.
PTs have also found themselves in a turf war with acupuncturists, who have been busy lobbying on the state level and going to court to keep PTs from using the procedure.
From Mark Crislip, who has a “dry” take on the matter:
*"…it is safe to say that for all practical purposes dry needling is yet another form of the acupunctures and likely just as ineffective. Dry needlers have simply abandoned 2,000 years of nonsensical baggage that accompanies the acupunctures and have added a ducks breath of science and modernity to their placebo…
If you are practicing the pseudo-medicine of the acupunctures, then you have to have gone through the education and training of an acupuncturist, which is 99.9% nonsense, and are subject to state licensing and oversight.
If dry needling is not acupuncture, then a PT or a DC or an ND or whoever is free of those onerous requirements and can needle without the worry of acupuncture boards and regulations…
Me? I would take a PT over an acupuncturist any day. They are not trained in the nonsense of chi and meridians, with the somewhat-more-plausible trigger point as a clinical guiding principle. PTs are grounded in reality-based medicine, and I want my pseudo-medicines with a modern patina."*
I have had trigger point injections done - similar to dry needling, but there is something in the needle. - although not much (not steroids, for instance). There are a few differences.
Mine are done by an M.D. who specializes in back pain, not a PT or acupuncturist. And they go deep into the muscle tissue. Acupuncture barely pierces the skin. The muscle is engaged with a TPI - it reacts to the needle and jumps (a TENs unit has the muscle do a similar thing). The doctor moved the needle around - I had an intern in the room and she said “you can kind of feel it when it loosens up and you can move to the next spot.” And I feel it from my end as well - when I think “oh, that did it” she tends to move the needle.
I know that TPIs freed up a shoulder that gave me constant pain for fifteen years - or the constant pain went away after the first TPI for a year and after the second for the last three - maybe correlation is not causation - but I did years of PT with little to no results - this took 15 minutes and $250.
But TPIs would never work for a disk problem - they are really a muscle solution - if they are going to work at all.
It’s only one study reported to you third hand (so only slightly less reliable than anecdote), but I read (I’m pretty sure in the excellent book Bad Science by Ben Goldacre) about a comprehensive study of various forms of treatment for back pain, including “alternative” treatments like acupuncture and traditional treatments like exercise and PT. Nothing worked well, but two treatments had a stronger effect than the rest, which were only slightly better than no treatment. The two most effective treatments were acupuncture and sham acupuncture, in which needles were stuck at random. The conclusion was that there are no treatments (including PT) that are much better than placebo, but the elaborateness of acupuncture made it a very effective placebo, even though it has no possible medical effect whatsoever.
Does your back feel better when you are under less stress?
Does getting fussed over for half an hour (while being stuck with tiny needles) lower your stress level?
If the answer to both of these things is yes, then accupuncture will probably help your back. Although if that’s the case, then I might suggest that just getting a massage or a spa day will do the same without the risk of infection that goes with piercing the skin.
My back issues are more slipped hip/scoliosis. I had not real luck with PT, some minor benefits from accupuncture, and good results from a chiropractor. OK – in the interest of full disclosure I believe the last doctor should also wear a bone through his nose and some sort of a mask. But by God the pain went away after a couple visits and I rarely need to return more than once a year or so. So my advice is whatever works for you and screw what any of us think.
I also have back pain from spinal stenosis and disc problems. But unlike kambuckta, I’m able to sit; it’s standing that’s the problem. So I’m able to drive, but once I get out of the car I’m in pain until I can sit again. I’m unable to tolerate most painkillers, because they’re bad for my kidney disease; the other painkillers have no effect whatsoever, even Lyrica. And in my case, surgery can be too risky due to other health concerns. Many of you are ignoring the fact that there’s a huge difference between spinal nerve pain and muscle or joint pain. Something like chiropractic or massage could actually exacerbate the pain, permanently. I have tried acupuncture, and its effect on the pain was zero. The only thing that even remotely helped was PT, and that was just to help me get in and out of bed without screaming in agony. I’ve been in continuous pain for 21 months, and there are times when I just feel like giving up.
They’re conclusion doesn’t match their details - dry needling was shown to be better than the placebo group in range of motion and pain reduction compared to placebo and, where reported, control groups:
It was, however, shown to be less effective than “other treatments” in both cases:
This is one reason the vast majority of PTs’ who practice dry needling will not use it as the only treatment methodology. It will always be coupled with exercise and passive/active ROM. That said, there are not enough studies of dry needling to establish efficacy.
I would rather opt for an intervention that works whether I believe in it or not. In the case of acupuncture, I am :dubious: about a modality where sticking needles in non-chi points (or doing sham acupuncture where the needle doesn’t actually enter the skin) work as well as the “real” thing.