[CASE] Acute Sciatica (Self-Treatment)

 Acute Sciatica (Self-treatment)
 
I have a kind of chronic low back pain, so after a long flight, I had acute low back pain a few times.
 
This time when I woke up, I felt pain in my left low back to left buttock. That made me difficult to bend forward and make posture to wash my face in the sink. When I stood up and bent forward a little, I felt achy in my right SI joint and squeezing pain around right greater trochanter (left hip and buttock). I could walk, though the sacrum area felt achy.
 
Day 1

It is difficult to treat your own low back because the access is limited. That means it is difficult to bring both hands to the low back to find a point and insert a needle.
 
First I decided that I would attach a press tack needle, which was a very short needle (1 mm) with sticker, at a tight point in my left low back (around left Bladder 25) and spent a day.
 
Unfortunately it didn’t improve the condition. I think that is because it is very difficult to insert the tip of the needle on an accurate point where improves the energy flow of the low back on your own.
 
Day 2

I didn’t do anything, expecting my low back would get better naturally, though it wouldn’t happen.
 
Day 3

​Despite expecting my low back would get better, when I got up in the morning, it got worse and the pain was also radiating to the back of my thigh. It became so-called sciatica.
 
Actually I was a little scared, thinking I would need to ask another acupuncturist for a treatment, but instead I decided to treat my back seriously.
 
Obviously it is difficult to treat my low back lying down, so I treated myself sitting down and standing up.
 
I gave up treating my low back and buttocks directly and I couldn’t use points on my legs because I couldn’t bend forward, so I decided to use points on my head to treat low back.
 
I put my left hand on left SI joint where I felt achy and tried to find a good point which released the achiness in the back of my head using my right hand. To confirm whether the point I found was releasing the pain or not, I sit down and stood up repeatedly and once I found a good point to release the pain, I inserted a needle at the point.
 
I repeated the same method for pain in the left buttock, around grater trochanter and in the back of thigh. Then I retained 4 needles on my head. That made it much easier to stand up and sit down without pain, but I noticed that some uncomfortable feeling or achy feeling moved to somewhere I didn’t have any pain before such as the inside of my left thigh or left side of my torso.
 
At this point I realized that I hadn’t done the root treatment which harmonized whole body. After I used a point on Gall bladder (GB 40) to harmonize Spleen energy, the uncomfortable feeling disappeared.
 
After this self-treatment, there was still a little bit of achy feeling on left SI joint with a certain movement, but I was able to move more quickly without pain and bend forward or make the posture to wash my face in the sink without difficulty.