Integrative
Preventive Healthcare 

Acute pain is what results when you sprain your ankle: 

 

Your nervous system sends you a signal that tells you something is wrong and you need to stop doing what makes your ankle hurt. Acute pain is like a functioning alarm. It would help if you stayed off your ankle to give it a chance to heal. Acupuncture speeds up the healing process; it reduces inflammation and swelling and relieves pain. Generally, we will recommend frequent treatments over a relatively short period of time for acute pain. A sub-set of acute pain is pain that is work-related or caused by overuse. 

 

Chronic pain is something else altogether:

 

It is a distinct neurological condition, and it's much more complicated. Some pain researchers are beginning to describe chronic pain as a disease in and of itself, a phenomenon that occurs when, for some reason, the body's warning signals don't work. In cases of chronic pain, there is often no diagnosis that can adequately explain why people are hurting. Many chronic pain patients are frustrated that they are suffering so much, and yet "the doctors can't find anything wrong." 

 

However, the cause of low back pain can be different:

 

So, each patient must be evaluated and managed in the context of the patient's daily lifestyle. Acupuncture can be an effective treatment method, easily applicable with immediate effect. In acute back sprain or low back strain, even the body's non-injured healthy muscles freeze up in an overreaction of the body's defensive mechanism. Although the sprain or the strained muscle tissue would need time to recover, the surrounding muscle tissues, which have not been injured, do not need recovery time. Just by stimulating the Qi of the surrounding muscle fibers, we can relax the overreacting muscles and relieve them of their unnecessary rigidness, thus immediately reducing pain. With the overreaction gone, the patient only has to deal with the original injury, which can also help recover quickly through appropriate acupuncture and thermal therapy.