Back and neck pain causes great hardship and emotional strain on people.
When I am able to relieve people of their back pain or neck pain through acupuncture, I feel I have truly helped them and this is one of the main reasons I apply acupuncture on people. Acupuncture works very well in conjunction with Chinese herbs and is known collectively as Chinese medicine.
I think of Chinese medicine today as complimentary medicine because it often works so well in combination with Western medicine.
Western medicine is powerful and clearly effective. Many time it does come with trade-offs that are tough to accept like surgery, cutting, drugs with side-effects and lifelong therapies. In many cases this will be the only solution. My approach is to try to solve any problem with the minimal impact on the patient first and escalate to more serious approaches only when the gently ones are not working.
There are times when I’ve seen Chinese medicine work better than Western medicine and prevent the need of more invasive procedures that is widespread in Western medicine. I have treated people when they are in pain and have sometimes eliminated the need for medication and occasionally even surgery!
To me that is risk reduction and an overall improvement on qualiy of life and that’s a core thing I think I provide to my patients.
I frequently do acupuncture on people with back or neck pain or even carpal tunnel syndrome and they almost always experience improvement and often reach levels of relief that they have not had since their problem surfaced.