Acupuncture For Back Pain

Can Acupuncture Help Your Back Pain?

Acupuncture for Back Pain

Nearly 8 out of every 10 people will have low back pain at some point in life. Back pain is one of the top reasons people seek medical treatment. It is also the no. 1 reported reason for seeking acupuncture. The good news is chronic low back pain is one of the conditions that research suggests acupuncture may be an effective tool for treating. One recent review of 22 acupuncture studies showed that it provided short-term relief from chronic back pain. It also showed there was greater improvement in pain for people who got acupuncture compared to those who received a “sham” treatment. Other studies have found, though, that sham acupuncture can be as effective as actual acupuncture. Those studies also found that, compared to standard treatment, both actual acupuncture and sham acupuncture are more effective.

How Acupuncture Appears to Help Back Pain

For low back pain, a cochrane review 9 stated: thirty-five rcts covering 2861 patients were included in this systematic review. There is insufficient evidence to make any recommendations about acupuncture or dry-needling for acute low-back pain. For chronic low-back pain, results show that acupuncture is more effective for pain relief than no treatment or sham treatment, in measurements taken up to three months. The results also show that for chronic low-back pain, acupuncture is more effective for improving function than no treatment, in the short-term. Acupuncture is not more effective than other conventional and ‘alternative’ treatments. When acupuncture is added to other conventional therapies, it relieves pain and improves function better than the conventional therapies alone. However, effects are only small. Dry-needling appears to be a useful adjunct to other therapies for chronic low-back pain.

Acupuncture Risks and Side Effects

Acupuncture has some risks and side effects, which we’ve outlined here for you. These may include pain, bruising, soreness, or bleeding. Any type of treatment, including acupuncture, has risks for side effects. However, according to the american family physician , “12 prospective studies of more than 1 million acupuncture treatments showed the risk of a serious adverse event to be 0. 05 per 10,000 treatments. ” as long as acupuncture is performed by trained and qualified practitioners, evidence supports it as a safe treatment for back pain.

Points to Consider About Acupuncture

Acupuncture is a traditional therapy based on the idea of energetics in the body. Treatment consists of inserting needles at various pressure points on the body and through the skin. Needles are not meant to cause pain, harm, or discomfort. A professional acupuncturist will target energy (or “qi” in chinese medicine) points for treatment. These are also called meridians, with some being of special benefit to painful nerves and muscles in the back. There are a few qi meridians that an acupuncturist may focus on for back pain.

Related to Back Pain

Pain may also be felt, or a reaction discovered on examination, at any of the back-shu points. To save you clicking on that link, which takes you to a page about them, the back-shu’s are acupuncture points which are often important for both diagnosing and treating problems related to individual energy organs or zang-fu. Location of.

What’s Causing Your Low Back Pain?

Here’s what is causing your lower back pain how to improve your posture the depression-chronic pain link.

Does Acupuncture Help Back Pain?

Your job demands you to be seated in front of your computer for hours with very few breaks in between. It’s been quite a few years that you have been in the job. On one fine morning, when you try to get up from your bed, you can experience a burning sensation with shooting pain in your back. It’s the onset of back pain owing to your long hours in your chair, and the faster you address this issue, the better for you. Healing back pain is easier now. You can undergo acupuncture for back pain since it has gained immense popularity due to its effective results.

How acupuncture helps back pain

A 2012 analysis of data on participants in acupuncture studies looked at back and neck pain together and found that actual acupuncture was more helpful than either no acupuncture or simulated acupuncture. A 2010 review by the agency for healthcare research and quality found that acupuncture relieved low-back pain immediately after treatment but not over longer periods of time. A 2008 systematic review of studies on acupuncture for low-back pain found strong evidence that combining acupuncture with usual care helps more than usual care alone. The same review also found strong evidence that there is no difference between the effects of actual and simulated acupuncture in people with low-back pain.

What you should know about back pain and acupuncture

Answer from brent a. Bauer, m. D. Many people who have chronic low back pain have found acupuncture to be helpful. But the scientific evidence to support these claims has been mixed, partly because it can be difficult to devise a good form of sham acupuncture for comparison. Acupuncture for back pain involves inserting very thin needles to various depths into strategic points on your body. Scientific studies have indicated that sham acupuncture works just as well as real acupuncture for back pain. A key point, though, is that in several studies, both sham acupuncture and real acupuncture relieved low back pain better than having no treatment at all.

How to get acupuncture for back pain

Categories – acupuncture , carling , pain back pain is one of the most common health conditions. It has been reported that 80% of the population will experience back pain some time in their life. Until fairly recently, it was the number one reason why people sought acupuncture treatments for relief (now the majority of people seeking acupuncture recognize its benefits in treating pain from nearly every cause, digestive disorders, immune disorders, hormonal imbalances, fatigue, etc. ). But does it really work, and how? for thousands of years (literally), acupuncturists have successfully treated acute and chronic low back pain. In all that time, people didn’t wait for research to “prove” that acupuncture worked. It just worked, they knew it worked, and acupuncture was the primary means by which they got relief. We’re a little slow here in the u. S. Because we have to “prove it”, and prove it by our own studies. But now there are more than 2 dozen studies confirming the benefits of acupuncture for back pain. When you begin to look at research done in other countries, the number of studies is truly amazing, and it just leaves no doubt.

Acupuncture for Back Pain: An Effective Way to Reduce Stubborn Pain

“is acupuncture effective to help reduce back pain, and is it safe?” is a question some people with back pain ask me. Acupuncture is indeed an effective and safe way to help relieve your back pain—when the treatment is administered by a trained and licensed acupuncturist. It is worth talking to your doctor about trying it for your particular back pain-related symptoms. Acupuncture has been an integral part of chinese medicine for over 4,000 years, although the benefits were slowly discovered in the western world. Photo source: nicole heuschkel, lac.

What are the Acupuncture points for Back Pain?

Did you know that approximately 80% of all people suffer with back pain at some point in their lives? that’s obviously a massive proportion of the population, so it comes as no surprise that back pain is also the most popular reason for people seeking acupuncture therapy. Acupuncture originated in china nearly three millenniums ago, and involves applying pressure to acupuncture points across the body to help ease pain and improve overall wellbeing. Ancient practitioners believed that applying pressure to these points helped to encourage the flow of a vital energy called qi (pronounced chi) through pathways that connect the body’s vital organs.

How many sessions of Acupuncture for Back Pain?

Acupuncture for back pain is a very popular treatment in the pain control industry. Multiple studies have indicated that acupuncture works well and achieved good results and relief in a short time and initiate a long-term remission after regular treatment that consists of 12 sessions. Nowadays, it is common to come upon many people that suffer from back pain. There are various studies that show how acupuncture treatment for back pain can bring fast and stable relief as well as prevent its recurrence.

What Are the Health Benefits of Acupuncture?

Acupuncture has been studied in the settings of chronic daily idiopathic or tension headaches and migraine prophylaxis. Most of the published data relate to chronic daily or frequent headache pain syndromes. A cochrane systematic review of acupuncture for chronic tension-type and migraine headaches concluded that the existing evidence supports the value of acupuncture. 26 , 27 several rcts have found benefits of acupuncture. Acupuncture was found to improve headaches and health-related quality of life when added to medical management in patients with chronic daily headache. 28 another rct found persisting benefits for primary care patients with chronic headache, particularly migraines. 29 cost-effectiveness analysis of this data was also favorable, with an estimate of £9,180 per qaly (approximately $13,000). 29 in an rct of acupuncture for migraine prevention, individualized and sham acupuncture treatment groups had reductions in migraine frequency over six months of follow-up. 30 individualized treatment was significantly superior to sham treatment in the first two months of treatment. In another study, acupuncture was equal to or better than metoprolol for migraine prophylaxis, with fewer adverse effects. 31.

What to Expect When You Take Acupuncture for Back Pain for the First Time?

It is estimated that 80% of americans will experience an episode of low back pain and the condition is estimated to cost more than $100 billion annually with a large percentage of that due to decreased wages and productivity. That is a lot of people and a lot of money! one or two episodes of low back pain may not be something that most people worry about, but there are many who suffer chronic pain on a daily basis. Some of the problem is that western medicine can only offer pain reducing medications and surgery to help. The pain medications should only be used short term, have side effects and can be addictive. Surgery can help but not always and sometimes the condition is worse after surgery. Acupuncture can be a great alternative to those seeking immediate and lasting relief.

The data do not allow firm conclusions about the effectiveness of acupuncture for acute low-back pain. For chronic low-back pain, acupuncture is more effective for pain relief and functional improvement than no treatment or sham treatment immediately after treatment and in the short-term only. Acupuncture is not more effective than other conventional and “alternative” treatments. The data suggest that acupuncture and dry-needling may be useful adjuncts to other therapies for chronic low-back pain. Because most of the studies were of lower methodological quality, there certainly is a further need for higher quality trials in this area.