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Are you looking for acupuncture in Bedford Stuyvesant? If other treatments fail to reduce your neck pain, you may want to consider acupuncture.

If you’ve been following our past two blogs, by now you should be aware of just how effective acupuncture can be for patients who are in pain.  Neck pain is one of the most prevalent of all painful conditions, and there’s a strong that chance you have personally dealt with it at some point. As you might expect, acupuncture may once again provide the solution to this problem, especially for patients who don’t respond to other treatments.

Neck pain is considered the third most common cause of long lasting (chronic) pain after back pain and headaches.  At any given point in time, about 12% of adult females and 9% of adult males are dealing with neck pain, and its overall prevalence in today’s working population is approximately 45%.

Most cases of neck pain result from a muscle strain or sprain in the neck or areas that support it, although other issues may also be responsible.  Some of the most common causes of neck pain include sleeping on your neck wrong, sitting or standing for prolonged periods with bad posture, spending too much time performing repetitive movements, and carrying a heavy backpack, purse or briefcase.  Neck pain can also develop from conditions like osteoarthritis, a herniated disc or spinal stenosis, or from sudden injuries that may cause whiplash or other problems in the neck.

People with this condition most commonly experience pain that often gets worse from holding the head in place or lifting it for long periods, muscle tightness and spasms, a decreased ability to move rotate the neck, and headaches.  For some people, neck pain is also accompanied by upper back or shoulder pain, and pain in the shoulder may actually be referred from the neck.

There are numerous treatments available for neck pain, but some patients have tried many of them and still don’t improve.  This is where acupuncture comes in.  As with other conditions, a physical therapist may suggest trying acupuncture combined with physical therapy for patients that fail to get better with other treatments.  Many studies have shown that acupuncture is in fact effective for various conditions that cause neck pain, like whiplash, ankylosing spondylosis and cervical spondylosis.  In one recent study, researchers concluded:

Patients in the abdominal acupuncture group also exhibited significantly greater improvements in intensity of neck pain and a few quality-of-life measures than those in the sham abdominal acupuncture group, without any serious adverse events.

CONCLUSION: These findings suggest that abdominal acupuncture is an effective alternative treatment for neck pain.

While there’s no guarantee that acupuncture is necessarily right for you, this study and many others show that it is certainly beneficial for many patients.

So if you’re dealing with nagging neck pain that just won’t seem to subside, call or come by and ask our acupuncturist if this treatment is right treatment for you.

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