Pain is really stressful events. You are suffering pain.
What is the pain? The pain is the natural mechanism of body to let you know for protecting yourself from any dangers, and/or accidental injuries. It is as like an alarm to let you know for protecting the house from any intruder or burglary. Therefore, the pain is protecting the system of our body from any dangers.
Pain is “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage”(IASP definition of pain)
https://www.iasp-pain.org/publications/iasp-news/iasp-announces-revised-definition-of-pain/
In medical diagnosis, pain is regarded as a symptom of an underlying condition such as fractured and/or cracked bone, any inflammation, ulcer, and cancer.
Pain motivates us to withdraw from damaging situations, to prevent further damage from damaging situations, and to protect a damaged body part while it heals, and to avoid similar situation in the future.
Most of pain resolves once harmful stimulus is removed and the body has healed, but it may persist despite removal of harmful stimulus and apparent healing of the body.
Sometimes pain arises in the absence of any detectable stimulus, damage or disease. Pain is the most common reason for physician consultation in most developed countries. It is a major symptom in many medical conditions, and can interfere with a person’s quality of life and general functioning. Physical pain is coming from the inflammations of local tissues and Muscle Spasms due to the mechanism of protecting themselves by cramping Muscles for protecting by themselves. Nerves are coursing between muscles and inside muscles. If your muscles are cramp, nerves are jammed, leading to pain called as referred pain and/or tingling, shooting down pain . When you injured your body, your body can be bleeding with injuries by rupturing blood vessels such as big blood vessels and micro blood vessels. Major injuries are making micro blood vessels rupturing and leading to inflammation of local tissues to inflammation reactions such as heat, redness, swelling, bruise. This inflammation can cause affecting local nerve irritation, eventually leading to pain (dull aches and/or burning sensation) and/or numbness, weakness. Furthermore, the surrounding tissues of damaged tissues are taking over function of damaged tis-sues. Other tissue are over-used and prone to damage. So, the area of pain may be spreading out to the wider areas than the area of the pain of the first time.
Mental Pain is coming from stress reaction due to chronic pain. When pain is lingering, leading to chronic, you are getting trouble with mental problem. Physical pain is making stress to your body, leading to increas-ing stress hormone such as cortisol affecting sleeping, furthermore, make you tiredness due to sleep quality, leading to weakness of immune sys-tem. Therefore, ability to fight with inflammation is getting weaker. You are feeling more painful than before. And pain is getting worse with time going on. If you feel tired, you may feel depressed and be anxious due to the fact that you can’t control your situation.
The mechanism of pain is affecting your whole body and mind
What is the point for the solution?
I thought that you should have to find out the way of clearing pain. If you clear the pain, all problems will go away.
Lower Back Pain & Hip Pain
Neck/Shoulder Pain & Headache
Shoulder/Elbow Wrist/Knee/Ankle Pain
Sports Injuries
Headaches & Migraines
Phantom pain
Phantom pain is even if the pathological organ/body parts were removed, patients are feeling same pain as before pathological organ/body parts were removed.
Clinically, we saw few cases of phantom pain.
In a case, a patient is coming to clinic for abdominal pain after cholecystectomy which is the gallbladder removal surgery. After surgery, patient is still complaining pain. Even though doctors are checking, surgery is good and no problem at all.
The reason why patients would feel phantom pain is even if the pathological organ/body parts were removed, your brain memory is not cleared yet. Therefore, your brain thought that pathological organ/parts were still there.
Treatments are resetting brain memory, which is there is not any more pathological organ/body parts.
Acupuncture may help you with this kind of pain you have.
Neuritis
Neuritis is meaning inflammation of nerve. It can be peripheral nerve inflammation. What is peripheral nerve system? It is “a network of 43 pairs of motor and sensory nerves that connect the brain and spinal cord (the central nervous system) to the entire human body. These nerves control the functions of sensation, movement and motor coordination. They are fragile and can be damaged easily.” Usually, when you had an experience with fractured bone and/or cracked bone, your doctors concerned your bone fractures and cracks for surgeries and plaster repairing bone.
However, when you had damages of bones, you also might be damaged your soft tissues such as muscles, ligaments, tendons, joint capsules, blood vessels and nerves.
Neuritis may also induce pain such as burning sensation. It is really unpleasant experience. It is coming from nerve injuries, which is it can be due to inflammation due to infection such as shingles, insect bites and/or injuries such as fracture of bones and cracks of bones.
Acupuncture may reduce inflammation of nerves. Acupuncture may help you recovering from nerve damages.
Neuralgia
Quite common neuralgia is trigeminal nerve neuralgia and/or the facial nerve neuralgia.
It is very painful experience from trigeminal neuralgia. It can be coming from the inflammations or the infections such as Shingles, Teeth damage, COVID-19, Flu, Common Cold, etc. It is sometimes very difficult to treat those patients.
The recent article(Alfaifi A, Sultan AS, Montelongo-Jauregui D, Meiller TF, Jabra-Rizk MA. Long-Term Post-COVID-19 Associated Oral Inflammatory Sequelae. Front Cell Infect Microbiol. 2022 Mar 2;12:831744. doi: 10.3389/fcimb.2022.831744. PMID: 35310855; PMCID: PMC8924417.) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8924417/ is mentioned about the salivary glands affected by COVID-19 ” The salivary glands were recently reported to be a potential target for SARS-CoV-2 infection due to the demonstrated expression of ACE2/transmembrane serine proteases 2 (TMPRSS2) receptor in salivary glands epithelial cells (Pascolo et al., 2020; Corchuelo and Ulloa, 2020; da Silva Pedrosa et al., 2021; Tsuchiya, 2021).”
First of all, I want to rule out any teeth problems. So, I asked the patients whether to see the doctors and/or the dentists for any investigations or not. If not, I’ll ask the patients to see the doctors and/or the dentists. Even though they couldn’t find out any problems, I’ll check any problems.
Recently, the typical problems from my clinic are the inflammation of the Parotid Gland which may affect the nerves of the facial nerve and the mandibular branches of the trigeminal nerve.
The Parotid Gland is a salivary gland to relieve the saliva to the mouth at the around ear lobe of both side of lateral face. As you can see at above diagram, the parotid branches of the trigeminal nerve which is communicating with the facial nerve and the facial nerve are embedded in the parotid gland. If your parotid gland is inflammed, the nerves may be inflammed.
Therefore, the inflamed nerve may be causing the pain along the pathway of those nerves. Furthermore, some of patients are presenting the dizziness, nausea, vomiting, and inability to walk without support from other people.
The acupuncture treatment may help you those symtoms.
Peripheral Neuropathy
Peripheral neuropathy means that the outside nerves of brain and/or spinal cords are causing the pain such as pain, numbness, pins and needle sensations, and weakness. However, the major concern is the pain. Usually, the patients are complaining about the lower leg and/or foot. Most of the patients had been in their doctor’s clinic for investigating their peripheral neuropathy and they are suffering for years. Usually , they have the prescription with the medications of pain killer, anti-inflammatory medications, muscle relaxants, anti-depressants, anti-seizure medications, etc. Even if they are continuously taking those medications, they are still experiencing the pains. That is why they are looking for other solutions.
As one of acupuncturist, I couldn’t guarantee your result from acupuncture treatments. I may help you.
From my daily practice, when the patients of peripheral neuropathy are visiting by themselves and/or referring from their friends, family members, they are suffering for long times such as a few years.
If their problem is long problem called as the chronic condition, it is usually taking times to clear that problem. Because the area of problem is not simple and not small area. As like bush fire, when the fire in bush is starting, it may be small fire to extinguish easily. But if that fire is not extinguished at the early stage, the fire is spreading to the other areas. The area of fire is getting wider and bigger area. So, it is taking time to extinguish the fire than the initial stage of the fire state. That kind of logic can be applied to your problem.
The peripheral neuropathy may be coming from the locally, systemically, and/or the pathway of the nerves. It is not easy to differentiate them.
In practice, I am seeing those patients frequently.
Restless leg syndrome(RLS)
Restless leg syndrome is quite often seeing in the daily practice. It is affecting the quality of the sleep during the night and/or the evening time when you rest. The patient may feel the urgency to move her or his leg, due to the fact of the uncomfortable as like the tingling, crawling, itching, burning sensation. It may come from the brain disorder such as the dopamine abnormality and/or iron deficiency.
However, the pathway of the nerve may be causing this problem.
I had been seeing those patients from the time to time.
Abdominal pain/ groin pain without anything wrong in the tummy
Do you have any experience of the abdominal/groin pain without any wrong in the tummy?
The pain on the lower abdominal/groin is quite frequently seeing in the daily practice. The patients are saying that they had been in hospital and doctor’s practice to check them up with the scan. They were showing nothing wrong with them. But they are suffering those pains that they don’t have any solutions for years. When you can see in the diagram, you can understand that the nerve system is radiating from the back to front. The meaning is that if you have the problem in the back, you may have the pain on the front of your body. So, the best solution is that you need to clear the back problem whether you felt the pain of the back or not.
Evidence Based Medicine
Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is a critical skill for physicians, and EBM competency has been shown to increase implementation of best medical practices, reduce medical errors, and increase patient-centered care. (Brown JB, Varadhan AK, Albers JR, Kudrimoti S, Cervantes E, Sgobba P, Yenser DM, Kane BG. A Measure of the Impact on Real-Time Patient Care of Evidence-based Medicine Logs. West J Emerg Med. 2024 Jul;25(4):565-573. doi: 10.5811/westjem.18082. PMID: 39028242; PMCID: PMC11254145.)