This week’s post is a short case study on a 54-year-old female, veteran, and cyber security analyst with Frozen Shoulder rooted in prolonged grief and PTSD. I will call her “Holly” to protect her identity and remain HIPPA compliance. I also have her written and oral consent to discuss her case.
Holly’s History
Holly was injured while on active military duty, where she sustained multiple injuries and sexual trauma. Of her physical injuries, her low back and knees have been in chronic pain for about 20 years.
Additionally, her son passed away from a car accident five years ago, and within 6 months, her sister passed away from COVID complications. This grief, which she still experiences today, has been reflected in left frozen shoulder. Due to these events, she has also been formally diagnosed with prolonged grief syndrome.
Treating Holly
I have been working with Holly for about a year treating her with acupuncture, auricular acupuncture, massage therapy, and injection therapy. Initially, we focused on her low back symptoms which included lumbar muscle tightness, sciatica pain shooting down her right leg, left hip pain when walking, and occasional feet numbness. I used well researched acupuncture points that provided Holly with great relief of her sciatica pains and low back muscle tightness. Among the points, Urinary Bladder (UB) 23, Kidney (KD) 3, and Gallbladder (GB) 29, were used most frequently. These points treat the symptoms as well as the root of her problems. I was able to reduce her pain from 8/10 to a 2/10 in 8 sessions and have maintained the relief since then.
Most recently, we have been addressing her left Frozen Shoulder that started shortly after the passing of her sister due to the extreme grief and drastic life changes in a very short period. Because of this, she has a very limited range of motion with her left arm as well as muscle weakness.
Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture
In Chinese Medicine, each internal organ has its own set of characteristics, functions, and responsibilities. Each major organ, like the lungs and liver, are paired with a bowel organ, like the large intestine and gallbladder. The lungs are associated with the emotion of grief, and its paired organ is the large intestine. The meridian of the lung starts at the top of our chest, near the outside edge of the lungs, runs through the front of our shoulders and ends at the tip of our thumbs.
If you have experienced a sudden loss of a loved one, you understand that it can be very difficult to process, heal, and move on with your daily activities. In Holly’s case, experiencing two major losses left her body ‘stuck’ in grief, which has manifested along the course of the lung meridian, and resulted in Frozen Shoulder.
Additionally, Holly also developed large intestine issues in this same timeframe. She was diagnosed with multiple colon polyps a year after the passing of her son and sister. This shows how the paired organs function together from a Chinese Medicine perspective.
There is not enough research on this topic since prolonged grief was only given a diagnosis code in the last 10 years. However, based on Acupuncture and the ancient texts used to study the foundation of Chinese Medicine, the lung points 3, 7, and 10 in combination with large intestine points 4 and 15, as well as others, are used to help with both the emotion grief and the pain associated with Frozen Shoulder.
How Acupuncture Works
The inability for Holly to have processed these traumatic events created stagnation in the lung and large intestine meridians. The needles placed along these meridians send signals to the brain, causing a cascade of nerve responses that remove the stagnation, or blockages. But, this does not happen in one or two sessions. This process takes time and consistency. The rule of thumb is for the amount of time you have been in pain, it will take about the same amount of time to fully clear the problem. Now, before you decide to stop reading, we also take into account the person’s lifestyle, nutrition and dietary habits, and any other health issues that may be happening at the same time to determine the approximate recovery time.
Holly’s Evolution with Acupuncture
I started focusing fully on Holly’s frozen shoulder and prolonged grief after the first initial 8 treatments and cleared her low back pain issues. It has been about a year since she started weekly and sometimes bi-weekly sessions focusing on her prolonged grief and frozen shoulder.
Holly is now able to do the following, which she was incapable of doing prior to receiving acupuncture treatments:
* Speak about her son and sister without crying
* Move her left shoulder 40° more in each direction
* Start exercising
* Speak about her PTSD traumas while in the military
* Be able to spend time with her remaining family without falling into a depressed state after
Initially, Holly would not speak in detail about her feelings, not with me or with her mental health counselor. It took about 10 sessions for her to be able to fully open up and speak about many feelings she was holding on to. This is when we both started seeing bigger improvements happen. She even started speaking more openly with her mental health counselor.
Conclusion
In moving the stagnation from the lung and large intestine meridians, we have been able to make and sustain these changes in Holly. Our current focus is to work on her emotion of fear; specifically her fear of being able to move her left shoulder fully and freely. I will discuss this aspect next month, so stay tuned!
If you or a loved one is living with chronic pain that you believe started with a traumatic event in their life, and are ready to truly heal, please click here to schedule your appointment.
In Healing Light,
Dr. Michelle Zamora
www.michellestherapiesacu.com