Typical Patient who comes to my Acupuncture Clinic

I thought I might start to feature some case studies of some of my patients. This patient is particularly interesting. She is in her mid sixties and came in for help with Neuropathy of her feet. Her other problems include high cholesterol and high blood pressure. It turns out that the neuropathy was made much worse by Lipitor. She finally convinced her physician to discontinue it, and she was doing better but then he put her on another statin. Her neuropathy got so intense that she couldn’t walk without a cane and was crying out from the pain. She stopped it and came into the clinic to see me.
I gave her treatment for stress and for the neuropathy in her feet. I saw her for the first time on a Thursday, and by the following Monday the pain in her feet was much improved, and her blood pressure had remained below 140 systolic and below 80 diastolic. She can walk without a cane now.
Of course it is hard to tell if the acupuncture helped or if it was tincture of time being off of the statin. Similarly with the blood pressure, it might have come down with the lessening of the pain in her feet.
I will continue to treat her for both problems, at least for awhile, and try to get her blood pressure low enough that she can consider cutting back on medications.
Interestingly, she had Clostridia dificil last year. A nasty life threatening type of colitis that is usually caused by antibiotics. And sure enough, she had been treated for 6 months with antibiotics for a bladder infection. She was also diagnosed with COPD because of a dry cough, when dry cough is a typical side effect of Lisinopril, something I’ve seen quite a bit in my clinic. The cough went away once she discontinued the Lisinopril, COPD, um, gone.
These are the types of medical histories that make people open to alternative medicine. First, do no harm.
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