Comment by thesunny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thesunny | Hacker News Reader

I haven't posted in a while but had to jump in on this.

I had very bad back pain before my first daughter was born. I wanted to be able to carry my daughter when she was born so I decided to try everything, whether I believed it would work or not.

I had massages, shots injected directly in the back, manipulation, and basically lots of different doctors and specialists. Nothing worked.

Since I said I'd try everything, I made an appointment for accupuncture as a kind of last resort. I had zero faith that this would work but carrying on with the theme that I'd try everything, I tried it.

The session was extremely painful. Note that subsequent sessions afterwards have not been. I think this was a function of my muscles being locked in spasm during that first session or something. Anways, immediately after the session, there was a marked improvement. It was the only thing that worked. It only took a few more times before it was back to normal.

If you haven't tried it, even if you don't believe, please give it a try.

I think one clarification to make is that acupuncture directly into the problem points to release a spasm muscle is more mainstream. Acupuncture where you poke your foot to fix your liver is perhaps more controversial.

I'm sure I'm trivializing or getting some of this wrong but just wanted to share my experience with solving my back pain. I hope it will help others.

One thing I've definitely learned about musculoskeletal problems is that you shouldn't discount apparently unscientific treatments if they seem to work. There's a lot we don't know about how that particular system functions, and things like acupuncture seem to fit into that. That's not to say the explanations they give for why things work are accurate, but the treatment itself seems to work sometimes.

I'm not advocating homeopathy here, but acupuncture, shiatzu, anything involving the phrase "trigger point" - worth a look. Apart from anything else, they're comparatively inexpensive and non-invasive so the cost of testing them is low.

Trigger point therapy gets a particular shoutout here for being one of those things that resolves 10+ year problems in about 15 excruciatingly painful minutes, sometimes. See http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/137795.The_Trigger_Point_...

The Trigger Point Therapy workbook has helped me quite a few times. I learned about it from a fictional character in a book called Sex Drugs and Blueberries, which is also a good read.

My friend had acupuncture on the NHS for severe back pain (prolapsed disc, ensuing sciatica) which left her with no relief and some pretty severe bruising. So whilst non-invasive clearly there is potential for problems. Only painful for a couple of days though and relatively superficial; so probably worth trying.

Your muscles are locked in spasm because they’re insufficient to carry the load. The long term solution to that is not acupuncture, it’s building up those muscles through exercise, and in particular through training with free weights.

Well yeah, but it's no good lifting weights with muscles that are locked in spasm.

Indeed.

My physiotherapist's approach is to engage in a variety of horribly painful activities to get those muscles to unlock, and then teach you how to do the exercises that will help you stop it happening again.

That's pretty much what I did, modulo the physiotherapist. I would lift, get punished for it with brutal back pain, wait for a few days for it to subside, then do it again. I was free of back pain within a month.

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