Low Back Pain Is a Difficult But Defeatable Foe
Why We Treat Low Back Pain with a Blend of Modern and Traditional Medicine
“Back pain always existed in human history and is the price we pay for our erect posture.”
Back pain appears to be as old as humanity.
When humans started walking upright, our backs started hurting—and they haven’t stopped hurting since!
As it turns out, cases of back pain have been described in countless historical documents, and researchers have even found evidence of degenerative spinal conditions in the skeletons of both Neanderthals and Egyptian mummies.
It’s estimated that more than 80% of the world’s population suffers from some form of low back pain, or LBP, and it’s one of the leading causes of physical disability worldwide. While numerous forms of treatment have been developed over centuries of medical progress, no single form of treatment is considered the “method of choice” or “magic bullet” by the modern medical community. Consequently, doctors, physical therapists, acupuncturists, and other medical practitioners often recommend multiple forms of treatment in an attempt to help their patients find genuine and lasting relief from back pain.
Low Back Pain: Common Causes
Age and heredity
Chronic inflammation or stress
Physical strains, sprains, and muscle spasms
Herniated or ruptured discs
Kidney stones
Pregnancy
Degenerative disc disease
Fibromyalgia
Osteoporosis
Piriformis syndrome
Sciatica
Spinal arthritis
Spinal stenosis
But it’s rarely easy—and low back pain, in particular, can be a stubborn and sometimes even intractable foe.
Every form of pain can have a negative impact on a patient’s quality of life, of course, but over the years we have heard so many of our patients describe the detrimental—and far too often debilitating—effects that back pain has on their ability to function and live a joyful life.
And that’s why we’ve made it our mission at Village Acupuncture to take on low back pain with highly personalized treatment plans that combine acupuncture, laser therapy, and herbal medicine.
While each of these three therapies can help relieve low back pain, whether temporarily or over a longer period, in patients suffering from a variety of medical conditions, in our experience the surest way to increase the probability of success is to combine multiple forms of treatment that can address different physiological and biomechanical mechanisms in the body.
Low back pain (LBP) can be an extremely painful, and even debilitating, condition of the musculoskeletal system. While most forms of back pain will get better over time without active treatment, many people develop acute or severe forms of low back pain that can, if left untreated, become chronic and difficult to treat or cure. Many factors—such as injury, age, or genetics—can contribute to low back pain, but intervertebral-disc degeneration (shown above) is considered to be a primary cause that accounts for an estimated 26%–42% of patients. Source: Mohd Isa, Isma Liza, Seong Lin Teoh, Nurul Huda Mohd Nor, and Sabarul Afian Mokhtar. 2023. "Discogenic Low Back Pain: Anatomy, Pathophysiology and Treatments of Intervertebral Disc Degeneration" International Journal of Molecular Sciences 24, no. 1: 208. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms24010208. Republished with permission under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Because different causes of low back pain can produce similar or overlapping symptoms, the first step in any effective treatment plan is identifying the underlying cause—which, in some cases, is certainly easier said than done!
Our bodies and minds perform at their best when our internal systems are in mental, emotional, and physical balance—or what modern medical professionals call “homeostasis.” According to physicians Sabrina Libretti and Yana Puckett, “The body’s many functions, beginning at the cellular level, operate as to not deviate from a narrow range of internal balance, a state known as dynamic equilibrium [or homeostasis], despite changes in the external environment….All in all, every medical condition can be traced back to failure at some point in the homeostatic control system…[and] the goal of the health care provider must be to restabilize the internal milieu of the body without causing further harm....”
And that’s precisely what we do at Village Acupuncture: we target and treat different bodily systems to bring your internal regulatory systems back into balance, and then we follow a customized treatment plan to maintain that internal regulation while we focus more intensively on targeted treatments that help to alleviate a patient’s specific conditions or symptoms.
Low Back Pain: Common Symptoms
Pain that fluctuates in intensity (comes and goes) over time
Pain that radiates into the lower body, including the buttocks, hips, or legs
Increased pain when the body is in a fixed position, such as standing, sitting, or sleeping
Acute or worsening pain after lifting objects, bending over, or executing certain physical movements.
Dull pain or localized stiffness after waking up in the morning
Pain that increases or decreases with certain physical activities
Sensations of numbness or physical weakness in the legs or feet
For low back pain, more specifically, we like to utilize a blended diagnostic approach that considers the problem from the dual perspectives of both modern Western medicine and traditional Chinese medicine.
From the traditional Chinese medical perspective, low back pain is either caused or aggravated by an imbalance in the internal systems, especially along the Governor Vessel (Dumai) and Bladder Meridian. Once we determine which meridians are involved in the injury or condition, we identify where meridians are likely out of balance and where internal energy is either flowing or obstructed. We also ask ourselves a series of diagnostic questions used by trained acupuncturists. For example: Does the patient appear to be experiencing internal stagnation, muscle tightness, blood deficiency, or muscle fatigue? Is the patient’s qi or blood strong enough to support proper healing and recovery? During this stage of the assessment, we also utilize a wide range of modern diagnostic tools to affirm and validate our diagnosis before initiating treatment.
This Chinese woodcut from 1537, the 16th year of the Jiajing reign during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), provides a visual map of the Governor Vessel, or Dumai, a meridian “channel” originating in the lower back. As the detailed illustration indicates, the Dumai includes 27 distinct acupuncture points, which are all clearly marked and labeled on the woodcut so it could be used as either as a practitioner’s guide or training aid for 16th-century acupuncturists in China. Source: Wellcome Collection Gallery. Republished with permission under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
In most of the low-back-pain cases we see, we’ll begin a patient’s treatment using an infrared laser on the most painful or inflamed areas. Both painless and relaxing, laser-therapy treatments usually take only five minutes to complete, but the therapeutic benefits can be significant: laser therapy can help to reduce inflammation, increase cellular activity, repair damaged tissue, and, most importantly, alleviate both acute and chronic pain to measurably improve a patient’s quality of life.
Using acupuncture, we then target the affected meridians while working to resolve overall imbalances in the body. During the resting period following the needle-insertion procedure, we will often use infrared and red-light lamps to help boost the body’s natural healing abilities.
Depending on the nature of the pain and a person’s overall constitution and chronicity, we may also recommend customized herbal formulas that can help with either pain management, systems rebalancing, or overall health and wellbeing.
Knowing that low back pain is going to be a particularly stubborn adversary in nearly every individual case, our goal at Village Acupuncture is always the same: we want to achieve better results for our patients, quicker, and we want those benefits to last well into the future.
If you or a loved one are experiencing chronic, acute, or intractable low back pain, consider giving us a call!