Acupuncture for Pain

Acupuncture has been used for over 3000 years to treat chronic and acute pain. By stimulating and enhancing the free flow of vital energy known as Qi or Chi (pronounced: “chee”) acupuncture enables the body’s own natural forces to educe its own healing and relief from pain.

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, part of the National Institute of Health, has found evidence supporting those claims, revealing that inserting needles into a patient’s acupuncture points allows for an increase in the rate at which electromagnetic signals are relayed, thereby increasing the flow to the injured areas of certain biochemicals that naturally enhance healing and relieve pain.

In an 8-year study conducted by medics at Germany’s University of Regensburg into the benefits of acupuncture in alleviating pain, currently the largest known trial of its kind, over a thousand people aged 18-86 were split into 3 groups, each group treated either with pain-killing drugs and physiotherapy, fake acupuncture, and real acupuncture.

After the first 6 months alone, nearly half of the participants receiving genuine acupuncture reported an improvement in their condition of at least a third. As the study proceeded, significant and lasting improvements in all the measures of primary and secondary outcomes were observed.

Among the researchers’ conclusions, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, is that acupuncture is twice as effective as conventional medicines and methods in reducing lower back pain. Also deduced from the trial’s results is that acupuncture seems to act upon a “common underlying mechanism” of the central nervous system that controls the generation, transmission, and processing of pain signals.

Acupuncture helps alleviate pain by the insertion of needles into points on the body determined by the location of the pain, though not necessarily localized around it. In other words, although Western acupuncturists place needles according to trigger points localized around the area of pain, in classical Eastern Acupuncture, needle placement is based on a wider variety of factors, including the energy meridians of the body and the inter-relationship between the body's muscles and organs.

Clinical studies by such organizations as the National Institute of health has found acupuncture to be effective in relieving pain in a wide range of conditions, including the following:

• asthma;
• carpal tunnel syndrome
• chronic abdominal pain;
• chronic headaches;
• fibromyalgia;
• knee and hip pain caused by arthritis and osteoarthritis;
• lower back pain
• menstrual cramps;
• myofascial pain (pain of the connective tissue);
• nausea caused by chemotherapy for cancer and surgical anesthesia;
• pain from dental surgery;
• shingles;
• sickle-cell anemia;
• tennis elbow;
• whiplash;
• and more.

Today acupuncture is widely used as complementary treatment for over 40 indications, not least of which is daily pain management.

To find out more about how acupuncture may help alleviate your suffering from pain or to schedule a FREE consultation, contact our expert team members at 773-878-7330. 

We are located at Ravenswood and Foster Avenues in Chicago (Andersonville neighborhood).  We are open 6 days a week and accomodate Same Day Emergency patients and have evening and weekend appointments available.