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!