by Dan Pappas L.Ac and Leslie Huddart L.Ac.

I’ve got your back. Call for back up!  He’s the backbone of this operation.  The human back not only occupies a central role in our physical landscape, it has importance structurally, physiologically and psychologically as well.  As the common expressions used above illustrate, our back provides a supporting, stabilizing role in our daily lives. The spine is an amazing area of bodily communication with nerve impulses flowing through the nervous system and the thick muscle layers of the back give us support and mobility.  The back is also a frequent site of pain and soreness.  The National Institutes of Health reports that 80 percent of people will experience some type of back pain or discomfort at some point in their lives. 

Back pain can include sciatica symptoms and vary in location from the upper to lower back. Pain can result from conditions such as arthritis, disc degeneration, musculoskeletal and nerve problems. The most common standard treatments involve painkillers, which may or may not provide relief and involve potentially harmful side effects. Luckily, acupuncture treatment can help relieve the painful symptoms of back pain while also rebalancing the deeper causes to prevent future problems.

Chinese medicine helps back pain from a number of different angles.  In a traditional Chinese medical understanding of the body when there is pain anywhere in the body there is a lack of flow or a stuckness which may or may not be occuring directly at the site of pain.  This lack of proper energy flow often occurs along the involved meridian or energy pathway in the body.  The pathways of meridians span the entire body like a harmonious subway map and have been time tested and used for thousands of years in Chinese medicine.  Similar to a subway system, if one area of the network gets too congested, riders in that area will be crammed into stuffy cars while people farther down the line may be waiting in an empty station as there are no cars available.  A Chinese medical practitioner uses his or her intricate knowledge of what certain symptoms, sensations and observations mean about the stagnation that the patient is experiencing.  With this understanding, the practitioner chooses the appropriate acupoints to harmonize the imbalance. Through acupuncture, areas that were lacking energy receive more and areas that have a stagnation or coagulation of unhealthy energy also get regulated.

This is an entirely different process than taking a pain pill which is often used to simply mask discomfort. It would be like putting all the unhappy subway passengers to sleep so they couldn’t complain.  Acupuncture aims to alleviate the underlying dysfunction and restore the natural balance of the body that existed before the imbalance began to occur.  Harmonious balance is our natural state in the body, but through many aspects of modern living we can sometimes fall out of equilibrium.

Many people have a sense when their back is about to go out or report feeling “a little off.”  These signs are often unpleasant forewarning of what is to come. This sense of anticipating pain can be just as stressful and anxiety provoking as the pain itself.  Back pain and stress can often be very difficult to separate.  Back pain is often preceded or aggravated by a period of high stress or overexertion.  Stress and overwork have a systemic effect on the body, decreasing the body’s overall functioning.  Chinese herbal medicine and acupuncture are particularly effective in this area as they allow the body to enter deep states of relaxation. People are often surprised at the level of baseline tension they live with.  We often hear people remark, “I didn’t know how tight I was. I thought I was relaxed.” as they feel their bodies unwinding on the treatment table.  It can often take an outside observer to see the tension we’ve grown accustomed to.  The power of acupuncture to interrupt these habitual holding patterns allows areas of chronically tight muscles to be released.  By addressing both the physical symptoms and the mental and emotional stress of pain, acupuncture and herbal medicine can increase the positive outcome of treatment.

As mentioned before, the body has a natural desire for balance or equilibrium.  When this is disrupted, as when we’re feeling pain with a certain posture or when we make a certain motion, the body will try and compensate.  Often this attempt at adjustment taxes other areas of the body creating the seed of future problems. If one subway line is flooded and gets taken out of commission, there is bound to be unexpected increased traffic in other areas.  These other areas of the body need to be addressed even though at the time of pain, they may be pain free.  A hallmark of Chinese medicine is that the whole body is treated and taken into account when assessment and treatment are performed.  By treating all aspects of the person in a holistic manner the entire system can be harmonized, correcting deeper sources of imbalance and preventing future problems.

Although acupuncture might currently be one of the more well known aspects of Chinese medicine, it doesn’t stand alone.  Treatments may include herbal medicine, heat therapy or particular breath work to increase relaxation and minimize pain.  Chinese medicine also has a long history of using visualization and energy based movements such as tai chi or qigong to address health issues and complaints.  This area is of particular interest at Mountain Lake Wellness where we seek to engage the mind and the body in integrated health and wellbeing.  Thoughts do affect our state of mind on the positive or negative side and we can use our minds to help us relax, rebalance and heal.

If you'd like to learn more about what acupuncture and Chinese medicine can do for you, we invite you to explore the articles and information on our website.   We are also available for questions and appointments by phone or through our website.

Here’s to your health.