Why We Treat Low Back Pain with a Blend of Modern and Traditional Medicine

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As it turns out, cases of back pain have been described in countless historical documents, and researchers have even found evidence of degenerative spinal conditions in the skeletons of both Neanderthals and Egyptian mummies.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.

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.

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!