Healing Chronic Back Pain With Acupuncture

With the changing lifestyles and sedentary working habits of people living in urban areas, new and complicated diseases related to lifestyle have started emerging. ‘Lifestyle diseases’ as they are popularly known, are caused mainly because of the stressful lifestyles that we have adopted over a period of time. Some of these lifestyle diseases are life threatening and should be paid immediate attention to. While we cannot always make drastic changes to our lifestyle, we can introduce relaxing techniques in our everyday life that help us regain health and wellness.

More and more people turn towards alternative therapies and treatments everyday to bypass the risk of chemicals based medicines. There is also the reduced exposure of long term medication. The fact that acupuncture is natural and has no side effects also drives people to use acupuncture. Recent research has shown that acupuncture therapy is extremely useful and effective in caring for chronic pain in the lower back.

An alternative treatment that complements medical care, acupuncture is becoming increasingly popular. Acupuncture needling can provide both short term and long term benefits to patients who complain of back pain.

There are three different levels of acupuncture – standard, individualized and simulated. In the standard acupuncture treatment, therapy is given all over the body as the standard procedure recommends. For individualized acupuncture, the receiver’s medical history and background information is obtained, based on which, potent points in the body are identified and worked upon. In simulated acupuncture, actual needles are not inserted in the body. Only the sensations are created. In the real sense, the whole acupuncture experience is simulated.

In a recently conducted research on a sample of 618 patients complaining of chronic back pain, it was found out that patients receiving real acupuncture and simulated acupuncture actually fared better than those who were simply getting medical care. Symptoms also tend to improve significantly for those who receive acupuncture.