Acupuncture, Muscle Numbness, and Sciatic Pain: A Case Study

Lawyer Holmes was born in Boston to a relatively poor family. He took odd jobs shoveling snow and paving streets as a teenager before joining the military for three years, which helped pay for his college tuition. He started drinking alcohol when he was serving in the military. When he was in his early forties, he decided to stop drinking alcohol because he finally realized that drinking made him feel horrible afterward and because he believed that alcohol could damage his brain cells. Since he was trained to be a disciplined person in the US Army, once he decided to stop drinking, he was able to stop drinking altogether. But years of drinking had caused hormonal imbalances. For example, abnormal estrogen levels stimulated his prostate and when he was seventy years old, he developed prostate cancer. He received radiation treatment and developed impotence for a time after surgery due to damage to his nerves and blood vessels. However, because he no longer ate junk food or drank alcohol, he was physically very healthy and was able to overcome his impotence after about a year.

He came to my clinic four years ago due to numbness and weakness in his hands, as well as muscle atrophy. At the age of 82, he was still going to court a few times a week as a defense attorney. He walked a mile with his dog every day, took no medication and amazingly was still able to sleep through the night for 7-8 hours. But he drank too much coffee, 4-5 cups a day, before starting acupuncture treatment.

When he first came to see me, I noticed that the muscles in his thumb were slightly atrophied. His grip wasn’t firm and sometimes things fell out of his hands. First, she went to see a hand specialist, who recommended surgery, but he said that while surgery can fix the problem, it can also cause chronic pain, swelling and even nerve damage. She decided to try alternative medicine.

First, I recommended that he reduce his coffee intake to one or two cups a day. Because acupuncture helps his body produce endorphins, serotonin, and dopamine, it became easier for him to cut down on his coffee consumption while undergoing treatment. Although the coffee did not interrupt his sleep, it caused the blood vessels in his hands and feet to constrict, stimulated his heart rate, and greatly tightened the muscle in the upper part of his shoulder. I told him that if he could cut down to one cup a day, I could still stimulate his brain cells without sacrificing the health of his heart and hands. He little by little he reduced the coffee from him.

I also found out that he loved to sleep on his stomach with his head turned to the side. This may have caused her muscle tension and pinched her cervical nerves. If the nerve compression lasts too long, the muscles in his hand may become weaker and weaker. I chose acupuncture points on her neck and foot to deeply relax her neck muscles, and then used electrical acupuncture to facilitate the regeneration of her hand nerves, which also strengthened her hand muscles. Once the blood circulation in his neck and hand improved, the muscles in his hand quickly strengthened. After 24 treatments, his hand function fully recovered and he no longer needed acupuncture.

Two years later, she returned with severe pain in her hip, leg, and ankle. The bread was so bad that she had to take Aleve in the morning just to be able to walk. I once treated him with electrical stimulation, combining points on his lower back and leg. He felt instant relief in one day. Then, she had such severe pain in the morning two days later that she had to double her dose of pain reliever. She was so afraid of not being able to walk that she decided to increase her acupuncture treatments to two or three times a week.

I noticed that her pain was distributed throughout the L3, L4 and L5 area. In the morning her pain was worse and moving around helped ease the pain. Considering his sleeping position, which may have strained his periformis muscle and irritated his sciatic nerves, I recommended that he sleep on his back. Initially, she periodically had to turn on her stomach because that had been her preferred sleeping position for the past 84 years. In this way, she could not stay in one position for long. She could sleep on her back for 3 hours and then sleep on her stomach for another 4 hours. By combining position changes and acupuncture treatments twice a week, we managed to get rid of this new pain in three weeks.