Pelvic Floor, Hip,
& Low Back Pain

Pelvic Floor Dysfunction

Pelvic floor dysfunction is often caused by a trauma, however, it is not always physical trauma. Dysfunction can be either holding the pelvic floor too tightly 24/7 or losing strength or ability to clench properly. This can be caused from sexual trauma, medical trauma during a gynecological procedure such as IUD insertion, or from pregnancy and childbirth.

Dysfunction can be described as a struggle to regain full pelvic control or worse; pain in the pelvis or lower abdomen during various activities like sex or first morning urination. Whether you experience urinary incontinence when you sneeze or jump, have to pee frequently, or pee in multiple streams as you struggle to fully relax due to urinary retention, these are all symptoms that can be helped with pelvic floor exercises following acupuncture treatments to help the muscles both soften and strengthen as needed to return to better health.

Sciatic, Hip, and Low Back Pain

Hip area pain is very common. Much like the trapezius muscle on the back, the biggest muscle in our buttock, the gluteus maximus often takes on a lot of the work and not every muscle in our low back and buttock are firing as they should when we move. Whether the pain goes down the leg or not, acupuncture can help to release the muscles in the low back and glutes to open up the spaces that are pinching the nerves. We can strengthen the smaller muscles that are underperforming so that we have engagement of more muscles that have developed uneveness over time due to posture and exercise habits.

Tension and Weakness

Muscles work hard to protect us. They are the shapers that keep us standing, moving, or changing shape. When one muscle is fatigued, overworked, or damaged, the muscles surrounding it quickly adapt to help us continue moving. In some cases, the muscle that was hurt gets overshadowed by its helping muscles so much that the body forgets to repair. Because these surrounding muscles had their own jobs to do, but is now taking on the job of the hurt muscle, eventually other areas of the body connected to them have to change to compensate as well. This is why prolonged hip pain can lead to knee pain, and shoulder pain becomes back pain.

Treatment Timeline

When working on pain, the number of treatments you will need depends on the severity of the problem and how long you have experienced the pain. A typical course of treatment is to receive a minimum of 2 treatments in the first and second week focused on reducing the pain, then in week 3 switching to 1 treatment to watch how long the pain reduction holds, and to look for triggers, if any, that cause the pain to return. When the pain is manageable, we reduce the frequency of treatments until you can taper off entirely.

Scars / Scar Tissue

For symptoms starting afterwards that may not even seem related, acupuncture helps the body to move energy through and past the scar tissue (whether it is visible or minimal) so that our body's ability to flow is restored. This flow, although it can seem "woo woo", has improved insomnia, depression, anxiety, and other symptoms in many patients.

When an injury or procedure is years or even decades old, people think they've "had the problem forever". This is especially true if the symptoms begin a year after the injury or procedure, because the event and their current experience don't seem connected. If the problem may be related from an East Asian Medicine perspective, we may work around the scar in addition to other acupuncture points.