Friday, July 27, 2012

Acupuncture for Hip Pain

Since I was having such great success in acupuncture for anxiety, I decided to give it a shot for hip pain. My acupuncturist was willing to try it and I have such great faith and trust in her I went along with it. I don't know if I have expressed this on my blog but at this point I don't let ANYONE touch my hip, manipulate my hip, massage my hip, stretch my hip...you get the picture. I think I have been through 7 PTs to date and I clearly have trust issues at this point.
My acupuncturist started by feeling all the muscles surrounding my hip joint, noting that every single one was tight, tender and full of trigger points.The worst offender was my QL, which has been worked on by many PTs before only to lead to more problems. I knew this, but still, I let her try to treat me, I figured this was a different type of treatment.
At the first session, she needled all the tight and tender muscles in my hip and back. It completely de-stablized my hip and made my pain worse for days. My muscles are tight for a reason, and working on them is not helpful to my hip joint as they need to stabilize an underlying unstable joint.
The next time I told her what happened so she stayed away from the majority of the hip muscles but worked on the QL. When she removed the needles she said the area was very red meaning it had increased blood flow, or something like that :-) So she put in more needles (the kind that stay in all week) into the QL to maintain the bloodflow. Again, this completely destabilized me this time causing thoracic pain too.
So what is the solution? I have no idea. I just sent my OS an email asking him to re-review my CT scan and x-rays and figure out what the problem is!!!!