Careful observers will see that Kevin has been doodling around with image editors lately. Being the old fashioned person that I am, I have been using an old fashioned image editor, Microsoft Paint. I guess the text boxes aren’t as crisp as I’d like, but still, it’s rather fun to put together simple images and words to convey different ideas. The idea for this is a real-life one. Sometimes – believe it or not – people will ask us, “can you treat back pain”? To my mind, this is like asking if water is liquid, or food could help with hunger. The answer is yes, that’s the most common kind of reason people contact us. There are a lot of ways to treat pain, and lots of ideas in traditional Chinese medical thought about it. There are common ways people come in and describe it, often as “inflammation”. While it matters to some extent what the cause is, what we are really thinking about when a person comes in is how to help the pain go away, what will help make the pain go away more or less long-term, and if a formula might be needed (sometimes, it is). So, yes, acupuncture treats pain, and I’d say that in our clinic over the past ten years we have treated thousands of pain cases to good effect. There are different kinds of pain – here’s an example, is your pain worse when the weather is damp? If the answer is yes, most likely that would guide our herbal formula choice in certain directions, then say if your pain is more, say, hot and in the joints, or more sharp and painful after a fall, or more if you have been working in construction for twenty years, or if you just had a baby. With this, and indeed most cases, health is situational. The specifics of your situation is what guides the treatment style, and the herbal choices. Life is not a “one trick pony” and patients are not what you see in a textbook. By choosing to see saavy and purposeful LICENSED ACUPUNCTURISTS at Perfect Point Acupuncture, you are one step closer to finding a solution. Thank you.