Nobody wants to be in pain. If you’ve had a recent surgery, a traumatic injury or a painful back condition, you know about pain. Hurting all day long can suck the joy from your life keep you from the many activities that fill your day.
Ironically, as miserable as being in pain is, it serves a couple of purposes. If you’ve sustained an injury, your pain is telling you to stop what you’re doing immediately to prevent further damage. This is why muscle spasms are painful enough to bring you to your knees; your body is making darn sure that you don’t do anything to make things worse. Pain also is a signal of damage at the cellular level. It can be a warning that you have inflammation, an infection, an impingement or other conditions going on. For example, how would you know that you have appendicitis if it weren’t for the pain? In this instance, your pain may be what saves your life.
In some cases, pain relief can create a dilemma, which is the relationship between pain and healing. It’s well-known that being in severe pain can slow down the healing process. It creates tension in your muscles and slows down the circulation of blood and healing nutrients in the injured tissue that are necessary for healing. In fact, scientists have discovered that after surgery, the greater a patient’s pain, the slower they tend to heal.
Knowing this, you might say it’s best to medicate your pain. And this is true in instances of severe and acute pain. However, it’s not as clear when it comes to conditions involving moderate and chronic pain. Research has shown that often the pain medications you take do very little to speed up the healing process, and in many cases, may cause you harm. Let’s look at the most common pain medications:
NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs), such as ibuprofen and naproxen are over the counter medications that you can buy at the drug or grocery store. They are also available in higher dosages by prescription. They help relieve pain, but it’s their anti-inflammatory action that can slow down healing. Your body’s first step to healing is inflammation, in which a variety of immune cells move to the injured area to fight infection, clear out damaged cellular debris and begin the process of tissue repair. When inflammation is impeded, it can slow down the healing process.
Other issues with NSAIDs are that they can hide damage and the fact that you shouldn’t be using the injured part of your body. NSAIDs can also cause gastrointestinal bleeding, erode your stomach lining and can cause ulcers. They also interfere with blood clotting and shouldn’t be taken by any who is also taking blood thinners.
Sometimes your doctor will prescribe a corticosteroid (steroid) for chronic inflammation and pain. Prednisone and cortisone are some of the most commonly used drugs. Steroid injections are often used for joint inflammation. However, these drugs have some powerful side effects. Prednisone taken long-term can increase the risk for osteoporosis, infection, obesity and diabetes. When injected into a joint, cortisone can reduce pain and inflammation, but can also cause tissue damage. For that reason, most doctors will limit the number of times a joint can be injected.
No discussion on pain relief is complete without talking about the effectiveness of opioid medications. They certainly work, but their ability to relieve pain can come at a high cost. The primary issue with opioids is that they are highly addictive. With the easy availability of these medications, opioid addiction has reached epidemic levels throughout North America, with the loss of tens of thousands of lives every year. Ironically, opioids slow healing, make patients more sensitive to their pain and increases the risk of their pain becoming chronic. Interestingly, while NSAIDs reduce inflammation, opioids actually do the opposite. They produce pro-inflammatory chemicals that increase your pain. In the long run this sets patients up for chronic pain, addiction and side effects such as constipation, mental impairment and decreased respiration—the cause of opioid fatalities.
The use of pain medications is complicated because in some cases patients really do need them. However, we often rely on pain medications as a first line of treatment without looking at other drug-free treatments, such as acupuncture.
The reality is that there’s a large body of research on the effectiveness of acupuncture for relieving a wide variety of pain conditions. Not only does acupuncture reduce pain, but it produces physiological changes in your body that speeds up the healing process, including:
- Decreasing inflammation at the site of injury or pain.
- Promoting increased circulation to the injured site, bringing oxygen and healing nutrients to the area while clearing out waste products and cellular debris.
- Acupuncture triggers the release of natural pain-relieving neurotransmitters that activate your body’s own opioid-like pain relief system.
- It helps to relax tight muscles, and can release painful triggers points.
The bottom line is that acupuncture can be an effect way to relieve pain, and it promotes healing at the same time. In addition, acupuncture can be used as a long-term treatment without causing any side-effects. If you’d like more information about how acupuncture can work to relieve your pain, give our clinic a call.
Cindy Chamberlain is an acupuncturist in Overland Park, KS and the founder of Eastern Healing Solutions, LLC. She is licensed in Kansas and Missouri and has been practicing traditional Chinese medicine since 1996.
