Patient Cases

Shoulder Pain

Patient Presentation
One snowy Monday, Jane, a 28-year-old interior designer, called me in tears because she was suffering from terrible left shoulder and scapula pain. The pain had started on the previous Friday afternoon during the beginning festivities of her wedding weekend. On Saturday, a massage therapist had tried to ease her discomfort, but with no success. On Sunday, her wedding was marred by tremendous pain and Jane was afraid that it would also ruin her honeymoon trip, scheduled to begin two days later. Her new husband, a medical resident, urged her to try acupuncture.

Jane was desperate to both eliminate her pain and also to salvage her wedding ‘experience’.

Examination and Diagnosis
Jane presented as a healthy woman with some trigger-point sensitivity and also muscle spasm in the left posterior shoulder girdle. The pain areas primarily involved the Small Intestine meridian. From the point of view of Chinese Medicine, the Small Intestine is an organ system whose primary function is to discriminate what to keep and what to discard: what is of value to the system and what should be eliminated. This is referred to as "sorting the pure from the impure." It is an an internal activity that is fairly routine, but which can require considerable energy from the body if many urgent demands are placed on a person at one time. My examination clearly revealed that Jane had an energy blockage in her Small Intestine meridian.

Treatment
During this, her first, and only, acupuncture treatment with me, Jane revealed that since her parents live on the West Coast, she had to plan her entire wedding by herself, down to the smallest detail. She told me that besides all of the decisions of her wedding, in her job as an Interior Designer she was constantly choosing and discarding colors and patterns and was simply exhausted by it. Even as she was speaking to me, her muscles relaxed under the needles and the spasms disappeared.

Treatment Results
The following afternoon Jane called from JFK Airport, ecstatic that her pain was completely gone and happy that her honeymoon could proceed without this torment.

Ordinarily acupuncture may require more than one treatment for maximum benefit, but this case is an example of the occasional ‘silver bullet’ effect.

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