Pelvic Pain Can Be A Thing Of The Past
Picture this: you’ve just slammed your finger in the doorway. It’s throbbing. Your body and mind are screaming at you for help. You hold it to soothe the pain and make a mental note to move your entire hand next time you close the door on it. Listen, learn, prevent.
Compare that to your response to throbbing pelvic pain. Sure, people commonly refer to this simply as “cramps”. Actually, cramps sound nice in comparison to what you’re feeling. This is actually gut-wrenching, sharp, throbbing, all-consuming. Remember that finger pain? Yeah, it’s like that but it’s your entire belly and sometimes it radiates to your low back or your legs. Again, your body and mind are screaming at you for help.
So, you do what you know, which is fine. For a while. You take pain medication, pray that it reduces the pain levels temporarily. You might also have to call it a day at work, or you might have to cancel your visit with friends who you haven’t seen in far too long. Then, you sit and suffer at home in silence, today and tomorrow or a few days each month, every year, for the past decade or three.
So, you listened and you sort of learned how to temporarily treat the pain. But did you prevent it? It can feel pretty hard to figure out how to prevent it, can’t it?
Instead of suffering in silence or placing a Band-Aid over it with pain medication, and then having to have what amounts to a sick day, you have another option. You have the option to treat it and prevent it from ever happening again.
But first, what’s the cause? Not all pelvic pain is related to your menstrual cycles. In fact, all people can experience pelvic pain. The causes can vary widely: endometriosis, digestive issues, musculoskeletal issues, low back pain, fibroids (the full list is quite long). Thankfully, pelvic pain and its range of causes can be a thing of the past with acupuncture and Chinese medicine.
Acupuncture and Chinese medicine can treat many different causes of pelvic pain at the same time by working on different systems of the body simultaneously. By working with an acupuncturist, you can discover the root cause of the pelvic pain and treat it on multiple levels to prevent that throbbing pelvic pain from happening again.
How? Acupuncture works on the parasympathetic nervous system (read: rest and digest) to help you relax. The parasympathetic nervous system resets the body by moving blood back to digestive organs, so you no longer feel on alert and as if needing to escape a bear. In response to acupuncture, the body also releases its own natural pain mediators – no medication needed here! – while relieving pain and muscle tension.
It also restores balance by promoting blood flow and reducing inflammation in the painful area. Finally, it helps to balance the endocrine system, the system in charge of releasing hormones, and in this way, can help to treat a number of hormonal-related causes of pelvic pain.
Instead of suffering with pelvic pain, you could feel relaxed, not focused on your no-longer-throbbing pelvic pain. Acupuncture can help you heal the cause of it.
Contact us at Portland Acupuncture Studio to see how acupuncture can help you move past pelvic pain and look forward to prevention. We can help you find the cause of the pain, so you can live your full life again, pain-free.
Established patients can schedule online, patients who haven’t seen us at Kwan Yin Healing Center call (503) 701-8766, or email us to schedule your appointment.
