With our current society’s reliance from doing majority of their work on the computer, it is almost certain that many will have physical affliction of the wrist/ hand. Whether it be working within an office space or at home on their desk for many hours on the computer, many people will develop carpal tunnel syndrome.

Carpal tunnel syndrome is a very common problem affecting the hand. Symptoms and signs include pain, numbness, tingling, and weakness in the hand and wrist. When there is increased pressure within the wrist on a nerve called the median nerve due to injury or physical changes to the area, sensations to the thumb, index, and middle fingers, and to half of the ring finger can be felt. These sensations include numbness, tingling, pain, and/ or weakness.

It affects people who use their wrists and hands repeatedly at work and at play and the chances of getting carpal tunnel syndrome increases with age. Symptoms usually begin slowly and can occur at any time which include:

• Numbness at night.
• Tingling and/or pain in the fingers (especially the thumb, index and middle fingers).

Because some people sleep with their wrists curled, nighttime symptoms are common and can wake people. These nighttime symptoms are often the first reported and shaking of the hands helps relieve symptoms in the early stage of the condition.

Common daytime symptoms can include:

• Tingling in the fingers.

• Decreased feeling in the fingertips.
• Weakness in the hand.
• Inability to perform tasks that require delicate motions (such as buttoning a shirt).
• Dropping objects.
• Difficulty using the hand for small tasks, like:

• Handling small objects.
• Grasping a steering wheel to drive.
• Holding a book to read.
• Writing.
• Using a computer keyboard.

Fast Relief Acupuncture has a developed a unique treatment and effective system to treat carpal tunnel syndrome quickly with long lasting effects! Fast Relief Acupuncture specifically targets the root cause of the problem, rather than the symptoms. With the main goal of trying to ease the pressure off of the median nerve, we incorporate many different, proven techniques to alleviate the problem with minimal invasive techniques. With a specialized combination of modern treatment modalities and diagnostic precision, our goal is  to help improve and eliminate carpal tunnel syndrome. Fast Relief Acupuncture can make your carpal tunnel syndrome be a problem of your past! Call today to get the relief you deserve!

The roster of professional athletes that use acupuncture is long and continues to grow. NFL linebacker James Harrison, Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, and professional golfer Bernhard Langer are 3 high-profile figures who have embraced acupuncture, and many professional sports teams have acupuncturists on staff to treat their players. But you don’t have to be a professional player to enjoy the benefits of acupuncture. Athletes and sports enthusiasts at any level can improve their sports performance with acupuncture.

Take golf, for example. Executing a proper solid golf swing is more complicated than it appears. Professional golfers make it look effortless, but if your mechanics are off or your muscles are restricted, there’s a lot that can go wrong. Over time, improper form and overusing certain muscle groups can lead to hip, elbow, and lower back injury.

The good news is, combining sports acupuncture with other techniques such as electro-acupuncture, massage, and cupping can get you back in the game and playing like a pro in no time. Whether you’re looking to level up your game or you’ve been sidelined with a sports injury, acupuncture is your best ally for speeding up recovery and improving your performance.

What Injuries Can Acupuncture Treat?

Here’s a list of some of the most common injuries that athletes experience and can be successfully treated with acupuncture.

• Hamstring strains
• Rotator cuff injuries
• Golfer’s elbow
• Tennis elbow
• Shin splints
• ACL strains
• Ankle or knee sprains

In addition, acupuncture can help reverse compensation patterns associated with most injuries. This is what happens when a muscle group pitches in to help an injured or weakened muscle group perform a task. This adds a second layer or stress and tension in the body that your acupuncturist can treat along with the primary injury.

How Can Acupuncture Improve Sports Performance?

Acupuncture can help athletes in so many ways. Whether you’re a pro or a weekend warrior, acupuncture can help you:

• Enhance Focus: Acupuncture helps to reduce anxiety and alleviate pre-game jitters, so you can “get in the zone” and focus on performing your best.
• Shorten injury and workout recovery time: Acupuncture increases blood circulation, which speeds healing. Sports acupuncture uses unique techniques to quickly decrease pain and inflammation, which makes for faster recovery time.
• Relieve Pain: Acupuncture stimulates the release of endorphins, your body’s built-in pain blockers, as well as serotonin, which lifts your mood. A powerful one-two punch to dial down your pain levels fast.
• Increase range of motion: Acupuncture can have a dramatic effect on your body’s movement patterns. Needling specific points stimulates the body’s proprioceptive system and improves energy flow and circulation. Electro-acupuncture can be particularly helpful in restoring proper muscle function after injury.
• Decrease inflammation: Acupuncture stimulates the release of hormones that shut off inflammation in the body.
• Relieve muscle tightness: By targeting certain trigger points, your acupuncturist can help tight and contracted muscles release and stimulate an overall relaxation response in the body.
• Improve quality of sleep: Acupuncture can help you get the good sleep you need to recover from injury, workouts, and simply perform at your best.  Poor sleep not only impairs healing but can interfere with your performance and focus when it really counts.

Whether you play sports recreationally or professionally, consider acupuncture to improve your performance and as part of your injury prevention and treatment regimen.

John Kim at Fast Relief Acupuncture is a licensed acupuncturist with a unique approach of combining modern sports medicine techniques with acupuncture to relieve pain, improve performance, and get you back in the game! Book an appointment today!

Shin Splints (also known as tibial stress syndrome) are one of the top ten most common sports related injuries. Runners, joggers, and anyone who plays a sport with a lot of running involved are at risk from this injury. The pain you feel from shin splints happens due to the shinbone (or tibia) and the attached connective tissues to become overloaded suddenly. This is generally when athletes train for too long or too hard, or if the athlete increases the duration or amount of exercise all at once. Running downhill or on hard surfaces, as well as having flat feet makes one especially prone to shin splints.

Along with the pain from shin splints, you may also experience swelling and hardening of the soft tissues in the area. Although rest is recommended, the damage has already been done due to the muscle tissue surrounding the shin bone becomes traumatized, causing micro-fractures of the bone to develop. Even if you rest completely, it can take up to six to eight weeks for the injury to heal, but will be prone to reaggravate it again.

How Acupuncture Can Heal Your Shin Splints 

Acupuncture is an excellent treatment option for shin splints, especially since Western medicine has very little to offer treatment-wise besides rest, ice, and pain killers. Acupuncture is found to be the most effective if started when the symptoms first begin.

By releasing several your body’s natural healing cells and substances such as endorphins, neuropeptides, serotonin, and neurotransmitters, acupuncture helps to promote healing of the area, alleviate pain, increase microcirculation, as well as attract white blood cells to the area of focus. This helps to speed up the healing rate, decrease swelling, and help to disperse bruising of the area.

Research to Back Up This Claim 

An article by Matt Callison, printed in the Journal of Chinese Medicine in October 2000, shows a study conducted on shin splints and the efficacy of acupuncture to help heal the injury. The study concluded that acupuncture shows to be effective in helping to relieve pain associated with shin splints. The group that received both acupuncture and combined acupuncture and anti-inflammatory medicated groups. The use of medication decreased over the duration of the study, as well as their perception of pain. The participants reported being less hindered due to pain both during sporting and non-sporting activities and felt greater pain relief.

Acupuncture is the great treatment option for shin splints. It is safe because no chemical substances are injected into the body’s systems and often painless because the needles used are much thinner than the ones used in injections. Fast Relief Acupuncture has a developed a unique treatment system where shin splints can be treated with long lasting effects! With a specialized combination of modern treatment modalities and precise diagnostic techniques, Fast Relief Acupuncture can make your ‘trigger points/ knots’ be a problem of your past! Call today to get the relief you deserve!

One the most common sport injuries for athletes is Sciatica. This disorder is an irritation of the largest nerve in the body known as the Sciatic nerve. The cause of the nerve irritation can be from a bulging or protruding disc pressing onto the nerve or tight muscles, especially around the gluteus/ butt region, squeezing onto the same nerve. Other than pain on the areas of the lower back and hips, sometimes symptoms of shooting pain, numbness and tingling, and/ or sensation of ‘pins and needles’ on the legs and feet are typically associated with Sciatica. Those that are most susceptible to Sciatica are athletes who are in a flexed forwards posture (such as cyclists), or in athletes that use a large amount of trunk rotation in various swing sports such as tennis and golf.

How Acupuncture Can Help Ease Your Sciatica Pain

The insertion of acupuncture triggers a response from your nervous system causing several things to happen. It releases a cascade of your body’s natural painkillers such as endorphins and enkephalins, increasing fresh blood flow and relaxing the muscles in the injured areas. These injures areas can be the muscles along the lumbar spine, the gluteus muscles, the hamstrings, and even the piriformis muscles (located deep within the gluteus muscles).

Blood circulation to the areas of injury is of utmost importance when it comes to healing injuries. If blood flow is restricted or obstructed for whatever reason, the area will be negatively impacted, and become much more difficult to heal. This is especially common in more chronic health conditions or injuries in which dysfunctions accumulate over time.

Why Blood Flow Is So Important for Healing

Having proper blood flow is important because it contains many of the healing components needed to repair the body.  It contains analgesics (your body’s naturally produced pain killers), nutrients, oxygen, immune cells, hormones, and more. Acupuncture allows that the body to receive the proper amount of fresh blood to the injured area, allowing your body to heal itself much more quickly and efficiently.

When you are injured, your body goes through two main stages to heal itself. The initial stage is mostly about protecting the area that you’ve injured. This happens when your nerves send pain signals to your brain, alerting you there is an issue in an area. Next, the brain creates a ‘guarding’ reflex in the surrounding muscles, making it more difficult to move (such as soreness or a limited range of motion) to make sure that you don’t injure yourself further. Lastly, the brain restricts flow of blood to the area in case it is due to an infection or a poison (from something like a snake bite).

Once this stage is complete, inflammation will be reduced in the area and your brain begins the second stage of healing. This is when acupuncture really helps you out in helping your body heal as quickly as possible. As stated earlier, the brain will release chemicals to help alleviate the pain, relaxes your ‘guarding reflex’ to allow increased range of motion in your muscles, and dilates your blood vessels to bring back blood flow to the area in need of healing.

Fast Relief Acupuncture has a developed a unique treatment and effective system to treat Sciatica quickly with long lasting effects! Fast Relief Acupuncture specifically targets the root cause of the problem, rather than the symptoms. With a specialized combination of modern treatment modalities and diagnostic precision, Fast Relief Acupuncture can make your Sciatica be a problem of your past! Call today to get the relief you deserve!

It is not uncommon to hear someone complain about having pain on their body specifically their muscles. It is also very common to hear many health practitioners of different scopes to say that the cause of these muscle pains is due to ‘trigger points’ or ‘knots’. But what are these ‘trigger points/knots’ exactly and how did they develop within the body? Can acupuncture effectively release or eliminate these ‘trigger points/ knots’?

In order to understand how ‘trigger points’ are formed; we will first look in simple way of how muscles communicate with each other. In a healthy muscle, the fibers and its nerve cell, communicate with each other in a clear fluid similar to water. This fluid is crystal clear in which the correspondences with other nerves are not hindered. The muscle fibers are also loose and relaxed, free to move without any restrictions.

When the human brain detects pain from an injury whether from overuse or trauma, the communication within the muscle system changes. The first change that occurs is the clear fluid described above responsible for communication, now changes to a sticky, glue- like protein-based substance. Due to its adhesive nature, the muscle fibers along with its fascia (muscle covering) rather than being free and loose, are now being pulled together causing adhesions from further injury. One way to do this is for the muscles to be contracted. Considering that the muscle is an external part of the body along with the skin, the contraction or tightening of the muscle can be seen to protect and prevent further damage/ injuries to both the bones and the internal organs.

One thing to note is that ‘trigger points’ can often refer pain to a different region of the body. This is due to the fascial planes found on the body. As it was covered in another article, fascial coverings of muscles are usually inter- connected with other muscle of the body. When one part of the fascia is affected or ‘pulled’, a corresponding but at a different region of the body can be affected. For example, if a ‘trigger point/ knot’ is found of the calf of the lower leg, there can be referred pain that goes down to the heel of the foot or a ‘trigger point/ knot’ found on the upper shoulder can refer pain to the back of the neck.

Acupuncture is the best way to release and get rid of ‘trigger points/ knots. It is safe because no chemical substances are injected into the body’s systems and often painless because the needles used in acupuncture are much thinner than the ones used in injections. Fast Relief Acupuncture has a developed a unique treatment system where these ‘trigger points/ knots’ can be released with long lasting effects! Rather than just treating the problem itself, the whole muscle along with the other surrounding muscles are treated with long lasting relief. With a specialized combination of modern treatment modalities, Fast Relief Acupuncture can make your ‘trigger points/ knots’ be a problem of your past! Call today to get the relief you deserve!