Acupuncture

Not one to immediately dispel the possibility that acupuncture helps back pain or neck pain by altering the pain perception or relieving muscle spasms, I feel that it is highly unlikely that sticking a little needle in a distant part of the body will have any long-term effectiveness upon the physical nature of spinal pain. In the overwhelming majority of cases, back pain, neck pain, and spinal pain are caused by a mechanical problem in the intervertebral disc, in which case, only a bio-mechanical solution can hope to accomplish lasting pain relief. I would be inconsistent if I supported any other view. I will concede that some people might get temporary relief from just the pain or spasm in that fashion; but, as for remedying the origin of that pain--I can see no possible way in which it could function in that regard. My experience in actually taking people out of pain convinces me that it only comes as a result of physically moving a piece of disc material. Poking with all the needles in the world cannot hope to physically move a piece of displaced disc material. Therefore, I cannot make any recommendation to resort to routine acupuncture treatments unless there is no other means of ending the pain and you get dramatic relief with the first therapeutic trial. If it works, my suspicion would be that it is due to the unusual patient who didn't have discogenic pain in the first place, or that the patient made a coincidental movement that spontaneously replaced the displaced disc material and attributed the relief to contemporaneous acupuncture..

Further Reading

Introduction
TENS (Transcutaneous Electrucal Nerve Stimulation)
Ice and Heat
Acupuncture
Trigger Point Point Injections
Epidural Steroid / Aneshetic Injections
Chemonucleolysis
Surgery
Percutaneous Diskectomy
Microdiskectomy
Laminectomy
Artificial Discs
Fusion

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