It creeps in slowly, then becomes part of the background noise of daily life. You stretch. You move. You take the meds. You do what you’re told is “right.”
And still, it’s there.
This is the kind of pain I see most often in clinic. Not the urgent kind that lands you in hospital -but the kind that lingers. The kind that no longer shows up clearly on scans, but still shapes how you sleep, move, and carry yourself through the day.
“I just want to feel at ease in my body again”
She’s in her late 50s, practical, outdoorsy, no stranger to hard work. But for decades, she’d lived with constant neck and back pain.
She’d had spinal surgery. Disc issues. Nerve pain. She’d also had some very complicated pelvic surgery years ago that left her with internal scarring and tension through her lower abdomen.
On paper, she was doing all the right things: she saw her GP regularly, stayed active, managed a morning walk with the dog. But still, her body felt stuck, tight, sore and unpredictable.
This is where fascia comes in.
Fascia - which is also called connective tissue - is like the glad wrap of our body. It surrounds and envelops everything in our bodies, individual cells, every tissue we have - including muscles and tendons, ligaments, nerves and organs.
When our bodies are working well, fascia helps everything slide and glide. But when we’ve had years of stress, hard work, surgery or trauma our fascia can get sticky tight and dehydrated. Not just in one place, but in multiple places, because fascia runs in long lines throughout our body. So when one part of fascia becomes tight, many other areas tighten at the same time too.
Fascia can hold tension for years. It adapts to help us survive, but it doesn’t always know when the danger has passed. And that’s what I could feel in her body - old layers of holding, not just around her neck and spine but through her pelvis, her ribs and even her jaw.
She wasn’t just sore. She was braced - ready for a fight that had long since passed
Acupuncture helps fascia respond.
Whenever I insert an acupuncture needle, I’m moving thru and engaging with this connective tissue. Gentle stimulation from the needle helps rehydrate and soften the fascia.