The wonderful benefits of acupuncture

[BailOut]

I have Degenerative Disc Disease (DDD) at L5-S1 (just above my buttocks) due to a dirt biking accident in my teenage years. Some days are better than others but every now and then I do something to irritate the bejeesus out of it. This time it was landing on my butt on a hard packed groomer on a failed snowboard jump.

I was trying to go natural this time, with no pain killers or muscle relaxers and no epidural steroid injections. I was focusing on intensive massage therapy which helps a lot, stretching which helps a lot, and chiropractic care which helps a little. However, I had hit a wall in my recovery. I got to a stable pain and spasm point but couldn't seem to get any better. Still lots of localized pain in the disc area, spasms in my lower right buttock and sciatic-related issues such as pain behind my knee and into my calve due to the buttock spasms. I have also been experiencing intermittent numbness along the outer part of my right calve, foot pad and toes. Just going grocery shopping can put me on the living room floor for 8 hours.

Each of my primary Physician, Massage Therapist and primary Chiropractor recommended acupuncture. Strangely enough, while my insurance carrier won't pay for massage therapy they do pay for acupuncture, so it sounded like a potential winner.

The person that I found is a local Oriental Medical Doctor (OMD), and this afternoon she performed my first acupuncture for a half an hour. I was a little nervous but found the discomfort easily tolerable. She placed about 12 needles from my left hand to my right foot, and due to the spasms in my back there were some involuntary twitches when the needles were inserted. Throughout the half hour I experienced many involuntary twitches and spasms everywhere from my left hand to my lower back, buttock and calve. While quite uncomfortable the twitches were not painful.

She followed up with a short "moving cups" massage that my disc area absolutely loved as it is negative pressure - something disc pain sufferers search for relentlessly. When it was done she applied a "pain patch" made of organic Chinese herbs that lasts up to 36 hours.

As I sit here on my living room couch 6 hours later I am reaping the benefits of that visit. The numbness is gone, the right leg pain is gone, the lower right buttock spasm (which my Massage Therapist often works out, only for it to return the next day) is only clamping 50% as hard, and with absolutely no synthetic pain meds on board I can actually sit up, laugh and sneeze without pain! I still don't walk right and the disc area still has some pain, so I have a while to go yet before I'll be back in the mountains, but in 3 weeks of treatment this is the best things have felt by far!

Acupuncture is definitely part of my treatment and pain management plan from now on. I have a massage therapy session tomorrow and we'll try to get rid of the remainder of the lower buttock spasm once and for all, and when I see the OMD again this Friday I'll ask her to put a cup right over the L5-S1 disc space for a while.