Acupuncture beats Western med for low back pain

http://www.naturalnews.com/026249.html

It's not enough to have a diagnosis... Give acupuncture a try, maybe that diagnosis is only a single-moment snapshot of where you are - it may not be permanent at all!

This article is hardly news to me! I see it every day - low back pain, and other muscle aches, are really hard for Western medicine... Even arthritis is often correctible with acupuncture, some exercises, and maybe some daily self-massage! I have even treated torn meniscus and herniated discs and had good results.

And people find all this "miraculous." I don't mind the enthusiasm one bit, but it strikes me that acupuncture and hands-on massage are very straightforward, no magic at all! The only reason it seems so wonderful is that Western medicine has left the hands-on so far behind that many folks who go to a doctor are never touched once... even those going in for surgery don't even get the basic "Does it hurt here or here?" examination. Instead they get a machine that takes a picture of a living changing organism - and the verdict is rendered by reading a machine's interpretation of the body!?!

And then based on such a fuzzy picture, the doctor recommends three things - surgery, meds, physical therapy... and marginalizes the hands-on therapy to only the things he writes down on a pad of paper! How can someone who hasn't even touched you prescribe manual therapy to someone else who isn't legally allowed to stray from the doctor's orders?

The way I work, I don't know in advance what I'm going to do. It's a combination of examining the patient, experience... and intuition! The results speak for themselves.