X-rays, MRIs, and other diagnostic imaging can be essential tools in understanding what’s going on in your body and deciding what to do about it. But they might also undermine your healing process – not because of any physical risks, but because of how they might limit your thinking.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, an X-ray must be worth at least a million, in that it shapes the story we tell ourselves. If your X-ray shows you bone-on-bone arthritis, or the narrowing of the spaces in your spine, it’s really easy to jump to the conclusion that your pain is permanent: something you’ll just have to live with and that will inevitably worsen over time, unless you do something radical like have surgery.
But there are flaws in this logic. Spinal discs lose a bit of their cushiness in nearly everyone over 40, but only a fraction of the population will experience chronic back pain. Plenty of people walk around with bulging discs and are blissfully unaware of it, while others suffer intensely. So pictures can be misleading: they show correlation, but not necessarily causation. They are also snapshots of our bodies at a single moment in time. It’s easy to forget that change is possible, even at the level of bones and joints.
Take “James” (not his real name), an 86-year-old man who came to see me for acupuncture after suffering for decades with chronic lower back pain, knee pain, and numbness in his legs and feet. He walked stiffly and unsteadily with a cane, usually not much further than the mailbox at the end of his driveway, due to pain and fear of falling.
His doctor had diagnosed him with “lumbar spinal stenosis,” a narrowing of the spaces in the spine, causing compression of the nerve roots that travel to the lower body. This condition is usually considered a disease of aging: like the upholstery on an antique chair, the cushiness of the discs between the vertebrae wears out over time. He also had osteoarthritis in his back, hip, and knees, and he had all the X-rays to prove it.
At 86, he wasn’t a great candidate for back surgery, so acupuncture was his last resort. After a handful of treatments, he noticed he wasn’t reaching for his pain pills as often. This was enough evidence to keep him coming in. After a couple of months of regular acupuncture, he regained feeling in his feet to the point where he felt comfortable giving up his cane. The pain in his knees and back dropped from debilitating to next-to-nothing, allowing him to resume his old pastime of walking a few miles a day by the river instead of just to and from the mailbox. His old friends were pleasantly surprised to see him back at social events he’d been avoiding when standing had been unbearable.
About a year and half later, James went back to his doctor and had another image taken of his spine. The new X-ray showed that the spinal stenosis itself had diminished remarkably, prompting the doctor to conclude: “We must have given you the wrong X-rays. The stenosis must never have been there in the first place.” His healing was so far outside the realm of what was possible for this doctor that he flat-out refused to believe it was the same patient, despite the dramatic improvements in James’s quality of life.
It’s understandable how an acupuncture-naïve physician (or patient) could draw such a conclusion: doctors are taught to think about drugs and surgery as the two main treatment options. Many simply don’t know how powerful acupuncture can be in catalyzing the body’s own healing process, with negligible (and often positive) side effects and zero recovery time.
So before you go for that knee replacement or back surgery, or resign yourself to a life of popping pain pills (which we’re realizing are far riskier than previously believed), remember that while your X-ray may be informative, it may not tell the whole tale. Something that looks “abnormal” may or may not have anything to do with what’s causing your pain. It’s equally important to remember that the image is a snapshot capturing just one moment in time. Your body is constantly undergoing a process of rebuilding itself, and if you change the inputs to that system (supplying it with new nutrients, movements, or interventions like acupuncture) it’s reasonable to expect a different outcome. Even if you’re 86!
Certainly there are circumstances where surgery makes the most sense. But if you’re among the millions of people suffering from osteoarthritis, tendonitis, lower back pain, neck pain, disc degeneration, sciatica, muscle stiffness, or fibromyalgia — to name just a handful of ailments — acupuncture could be an excellent first choice to reduce pain and regain mobility.
For best results with pain conditions, I recommend two acupuncture treatments a week for three weeks, and then re-evaluating progress. Depending on how long a condition has been around, it may need to be extended. To schedule your series, give us a call or book here.
Photo © Nevit Dilmen [CC BY-SA 3.0]
One of the saddest things I hear in my practice is, “I must be getting old.” I hear this from patients as young as 29, and I know the feeling: nothing makes me feel like I’m 85 quite like back pain that I’ve had since I was a teenager.
Maybe you don’t have the energy you’d like. You feel stiff. Maybe your back hurts (or your hips, knees, neck, or shoulders). The world feels like it’s moving too fast. But it’s not true that you have to fall apart before you die (If you have pain in one shoulder, why not the other? – it’s the same age!). You also don’t have to live on ibuprofen and caffeine, or outsource your wellness to your doctor, acupuncturist, massage therapist, or chiropractor. It’s possible to feel younger, even as the days go by.
Little things add up. Ever notice how you get an immediate surge of energy when you get an unexpected visit or email from a dear friend you haven’t seen in years? Notice how a couple days of eating processed food while visiting family makes you feel bloated and toxic? Or how about how not getting up from your desk for 15 hours when you’re under deadline can lead you to conclude that your shoulders are now cemented to your back? These all add up. It’s the things we do every day that most determine how old we feel.
6 things I wish everyone did every day to feel great:
- Get 7-9 hours of sleep a night
- Move your body in a way that feels good
- A body-mind practice to calm your nervous system and reconnect to yourself
- Drink water (half your body weight in ounces)
- Eat whole foods (mostly plants)
- Connect with love
Looking for a way to do 3 or 4 of these things at once? Keep Reading…
In the largest study of the effects of acupuncture for lower back pain in the US (published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, now JAMA, in 2009), it’s demonstrated that acupuncture is a more effective way of treating chronic low back pain than the standard conventional treatments of medication and physical therapy. Clearly, this finding is noteworthy in and of itself. Its findings are similar to those of the largest study on acupuncture for lower back pain conducted for insurance companies in Germany in 2008. It concluded that acupuncture helped improve lower back pain for at least 6 months, an effectiveness rate “almost twice that of conventional therapy.” [1]
If acupuncture has been shown to work staggeringly better than the current standard plan of care, why hasn’t it become THE treatment of choice, rather than seen as a “complementary and alternative treatment?”
The problem is that in both of these studies, patients in a control group who were given sham acupuncture treatments also experienced meaningful improvements, though not as significant as those who received real acupuncture. Critics drew the erroneous conclusion that because the sham treatments yielded positive results, the placebo effect must be the most important factor. It’s understandable that acupuncturists may shy away from bringing up research that may attribute part of our medicine’s success rate to the placebo effect: people are still largely naïve about the power of Chinese medicine, and we don’t want our very legit medicine to be perceived as something one needs to believe in. But the placebo effect is a factor in all forms of medicine whether it’s pills or receiving an acupuncture treatment. And the fact that acupuncture works on dogs and cats (who presumably don’t “believe in” acupuncture) demonstrates that there is clearly something beyond the placebo effect at work.
Returning to the lower back pain studies: let’s not overlook the fact that people got better. And that the patients who received real acupuncture got better results than they would have through conventional means. 60-80% of the public will experience lower back pain in the course of their lives (http://umm.edu/health/medical/altmed/condition/low-back-pain). People should know that acupuncture is an outstanding treatment strategy, outperforming the standard of care for lower back pain. Share this, tweet it, post it on your blog, shout it from the rooftops and help those you care about make an informed choice.
[1] Haake M, MüLler H, Schade-Brittinger C, et al. German Acupuncture Trials (Gerac) For Chronic Low Back Pain: Randomized, Multicenter, Blinded, Parallel-Group Trial With 3 Groups. Arch Intern Med. 2007;167(17):1892-1898. doi:10.1001/Archinte.167.17.1892.