What is Electro-Acupuncture?
How electro-acupuncture can help aid athletic injury, headaches, and migraines
You’ve heard of acupuncture, but what is electro-acupuncture and how can it help aid athletic injuries, headaches, and migraines? Electro-acupuncture uses needles to target the specific muscles that need to be activated for healthy movement. Picture traditional acupuncture, which applies needles below the surface of the skin along major meridians throughout the body to help relieve pain and soreness. Electro stim acupuncture adds a flow of electricity applied through the needles to activate muscles. This is experienced as a “twitch”, which is actually the muscle being activated. If your twitches feel like you’re driving over a rumble strip, your muscles aren’t “firing” properly. A performance therapist will continue to apply treatment until the twitch is smooth and solid, this means you’re “activated”.
Address and Relieve Myofascial Pain:
Electro-acupuncture is most effective for treating specific localized myofascial pain. Pain is brought on by compression, stretching, or chemical change around a nerve from things like scars, inflammation, swelling, overuse, arthritic changes, or traumatic events. Basically, this means that there is either poor blood supply to the painful area or that blood is unable to leave the painful area or both. This causes the pH levels in the area surrounding the nerve to shift. A normal pH is around 8 while the pH of a painful, inflamed area is about 5.9. You may experience this as painful knots or tight muscles. When a nerve is in this state of sensitivity or has a lower pH it takes less to irritate or provoke a pain response. (Similar to when you have a bad day and someone asks you the wrong question.) When a needle is inserted into the painful area, it mechanically resets the muscles and nerves by forcing an ion exchange normalizing the pH. When the pH normalizes, so does the muscle and nerve function by decreasing pain, improving strength, muscle tone and tightness, and circulation.
Electro-Acupuncture for Athletic Injuries:
A sports performance chiropractor will use electro-acupuncture as a part of your athletic rehabilitation to help reactive muscles to regain smooth, efficient muscle movement, relieve stuck joints, and muscle tightness. According to the Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy, electro-acupuncture is an “effective supplemental intervention for treating acute and chronic musculoskeletal pain” especially when used in combination with exercise. The “Needle Effect” has an 86.8% success rate in providing immediate pain relief according to research by Karel Lewit. Electro-acupuncture also helps improve circulation, which delivers healthy, healing blood to injured muscles and tissue and removes metabolic waste.
Treating Headaches and Migraines with Stim Needling:
In addition to helping athletes recover from injuries, electro-acupuncture can also help treat headaches and migraines in patients that chronically experience these symptoms. According to The Spine Journal, “Individuals who received thrust spinal manipulation and electrical dry needling experienced significantly greater reductions in headache intensity, headache frequency, and disability.” Electro-acupuncture has also been shown to decrease the duration of headaches and migraines. The majority of patients who received electro-acupuncture for their headaches and migraines were able to completely stop taking medication for their symptoms within three months of starting treatment.
Electro-Stim Acupuncture & Physical Rehabilitation:
Electro-Acupuncture by itself is not a sufficient treatment plan for athletic rehabilitation. That’s why a professional sports chiropractor will combine chiropractic adjustments, performance rehabilitation, and electro-acupuncture to bridge the gap between where an athlete is and where they want to be. If you’re interested in working with a performance therapist for pain relief and athletic rehabilitation, click here to schedule your first appointment with Werner Athletics.