Over the years, I’ve collected more than my fair share of very hard to correct ligament and joint issues while hiking and backpacking, and realized that many or even most people might not be aware that such issues can often be resolved.

My usual practice is to go to a western doctor first, to make sure it’s not something like a fully torn ligament or broken bone or whatever, which it never has been. Afer I’ve excluded that, I then get high quality acupuncture to resolve the issue.

I’ve had real success with this over the years, but realize many to most Americans just are not aware of what acupuncture can actually do when done by a qualified and ideally Asia trained acupuncturist.

When I find a good one, I tend to stick with them because they are hard to find, acupuncture is sort of halfway between science and art, I think the more rigorous their training was, the closer to science, and the less, the closer to art.

I had some severe joint inflammation issues which were hampering my ability to train and hike, or even ride a bike, and I started getting acupuncture from a local Community Acupuncture branch, which are reasonably priced and sliding scale, but generally are staffed by US trained practitioners. I believe the schools here are roughly 6 month courses, though I’m not certain. But they are definitely not the full medical school type training they do in Asia.

This was helping, but was very slow, so I lucked out and found Li Chen Wang, and she had the long standing issues resolved within 5 or 6 sessions. She just opened a new practice of her own at Orinda Acupuncture, which is pretty close to the East Bay, and is well worth the trip if you live anywhere close by.

Her new practice is located at 1 Northwood Drive, Unit 2, Orinda, CA 94563, (925) 247-4183, but you can schedule an appointment using her website. She was working with another acupuncture group previously, but it did not allow her enough time to do the care she wants to do, so she decided to setup her own practice.

While I’ve had good success with resolving long standing issues with the lighter less intense American style acupuncture, I’ve also had the real traditional type, which is much more effective and powerful, and personally prefer the real kind because these sessions take time to do, and you have to do them for a while for significant long standing injuries. This is by the way something I don’t think many Americans are aware of, acupunccture is basically correcting the damaged pathways in your body in order to let your bowdy do what it wants to do, heal itself and recover. This process can be quite intense, but don’t confuse intensity for pain, the two are very different. To me, if I don’t feel anything intense when I go, it means either the injury is almost fully recovered, or that the treatment is not that good.

So if you have some long standing joint, ligament, type issue, which western doctors have been able to do nothing for, you might have real success, to a degree you might not believe possible, with quality acupuncture, like practitioners such as Li Chen offer. I’m actually surprised not to see backpacking websites and resources talk more about this, because it’s so incredibly effective given a good practioner, which is unfortunately in my experience not a given at all, there is a certain degree of caring and intuitiun required that separates a really good acupuncture doctor from an average or even mediocre one, but the real test is simple: do you feel a lot during the session? And then, most important, do the symptoms improve? And if so, how rapidly?

There’s one thing I didn’t really learn until relatively recently, which is when you start treatment for a serious or long lasting or lingering issue, it can really pay to go many times in rapid succession, say 4 or 5 times in a week. The proactitioner should be able to advise you there, but I have seen very remarkable results by going several times in rapid succession. This is how they tend to do it in China for the initial treatment course.

You can learn more about acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine here. That page includes a history and explanation of the basic concepts.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 19th, 2023 at 12:28 and is filed under Our World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.