Accupuncture - worth it or not? Come and tell me your views.

[AddictedtoCrunchies]

I've suffered with knee pain on and off for many years and I had an arthroscopy on 1 August. He found lots of bits floating about which he flushed out and he smoothed the back of my kneecap. I've been through the rehab and was back running (albeit with some bearable pain) and thought all was well..or as well as it was going to get. I accepted that I would have some pain and could deal with that.

However last Saturday while playing a netball match my knee started to hurt in a different way. I had sharp pain behind the kneecap which is still there. It doesn't hurt while I'm moving about however any bending in my knee (especially stairs) gives me this sharp pain. I've done no exercise since and plan to rest it for a week or so.

My mother's accupunture lady has said she may be able to help with the pain but the only other time I've had it, I felt very sick so I'm wavering a bit.

Has anyone got any views - good or bad??

I've only had acupuncture once, years ago, and not for a pain-related matter, so can't really give an opinion.

But I'm currently working through Esther Gokhale's book to try and address my long-term back/shoulder/neck/hip pain (everything but the knee!)

It's early days, but I've had the most encouraging results so far of any treatments I've tried over the years.

And I do think it makes sense; we slump and slouch and key supportive muscles waste away fro mis-use, leading to varying degrees and types of pain.

Hope you think it's worth a look, anyway.

Oh, just thought; do you mean woo-style Chinese acupuncture, or the dry needling/steroid injections used by conventional medicine but for some annoying reason called acupuncture?

I've had the second type as well, and it did help a bit, (at least, the steroid version did), but I didn't feel it was an ideal long-term solution.

I found it very uesful in shifting a post spinal block headache, and my mother has used it for back/neck pain and found it useful.

Some podiatrists in the NHS are trained to do it, we dont get trained on anything that hasnt been found to be beneficial so I would imagine that it works more often than not.

We had proper needles for it too. Physio often offer it.

I've found it immensely useful in the past - but I had a shit-hot acupuncturist who'd trained for yrs in Japan (may have made no difference but just to mention that acupuncturists may vary in skill levels). She treated me for terrible haemorroids that I'd had for a long time - they went very quickly. Then she mentioned that she was going to try a different pressure point to prevent the constipation that would make them come back. She casually mentioned that a side effect of stimulating this particular point was that it increased breastmilk flow (I was bfeeding at the time & had literally just fed my baby so was empty). Well, she put the needle in and within 2 minutes I was overflowing! Leaking all over the treatment couch! My daughter was bloomin drowning in milk for a couple of weeks afterwards! So that bizarre experience convinced me that in the right hands, acupuncture can be very powerful. Good Luck!