Acupuncture for Fascial Pain: Why We Can Help When Your Whole Body Hurts
Written By: Dr. Kristen Burris, DAcCHM, LAc, MSTOM Doctor of Acupuncture and Doctor of Chinese Herbal Medicine
If you or someone you love suffers from chronic pain, hypermobility, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS/hEDS), unexplained persistent muscle tightness, chronic sports injuries, you may have heard a lot about fascia lately.
Fascia is the super glue that holds us together. It is a superhighway of intricate connective-tissue network that surrounds and connects our ever-important muscles, nerves, blood vessels, organs, and other vital structures throughout our body. Fascia if often described as the body’s saran wrap, more recent research increasingly recognizes it as a dynamic, innervated, complex tissue that can affect pain and movement.
This raises an important question:
If my fascia is contributing to my pain, can acupuncture help?
The evidence for acupuncture and myofascial pain is actually quite encouraging and promising. We aren’t surprised but many newcomers to the medicine are shocked.
What Is Fascial Pain or Myofascial Pain?
“Myofascial pain” refers to pain arising from muscles and their associated connective tissues that surrounds these vital structures and anatomy. The areas may involve painful trigger points, significant muscle tightness, restricted muscle or joint movement, a feeling of tenderness, achiness, and referred pain (meaning the area that hurts isn’t always the area creating the problem or where you feel the pain isn’t always the origin of the problem).
Patients often describe their pain experience as:
Deep ache or burning pain
Muscles that constantly feel tight, taught or rigid
Painful “knots” especially in the shoulders, neck or low back
Pain that travels or refers elsewhere throughout the body
Tender areas that reproduce the pain sensation when pressed
Restricted movement when walking, exercising, or even at work
Pain that returns despite stretching, PT, or massage
Muscles that seem unable to relax no matter what you do
For people with hypermobility or hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (hEDS), like Dr. Kristen Burris, there can be additional challenges and frustrations but acupuncture can be the end of their suffering.
When joints have excessive mobility due to laxity in our fascia or connective tissue, surrounding muscles have to work overtime to provide stability and structure. This causes chronic pain, excessive fatigue and a hypermobile person can simultaneously be very flexible and incredibly tight all at once.
That tightness is hEDS body’s attempt to protect unstable joints to prevent injury and more pain.
This is the main reason stretching everything when it feels tight isn’t always the best therapeutic approach.
How Can Acupuncture Influence Fascia?
Acupuncture can impact fascia, in fact, quite a lot.
An acupuncture needle doesn’t simply pass through empty space and do nothing. Location, depth, and expert needle techniques that only acupuncturists are trained in can have a lasting and positive impact on your fascia and your pain. Depending upon the location and depth of insertion, the needle and its technique influences skin, connective tissue, fascial planes, muscle, sensory nerves, and other local tissues causing a chain reaction of healing cascade to occur.
Researchers have studied the mechanical interaction between acupuncture needles and connective tissue in the body. When a needle is properly manipulated, connective tissue can engage with the needle, a phenomenon sometimes described for the last several thousand years as needle grasp. The acupuncturists can literally feel the tug from the other end of the tip of the needle through to the handle. We actually call that “de Qi” or big energy is a loose translation when you get the needle technique right. Patients can feel it too. This is not new. This is several millennia old and often takes years of needle instruction and training to master.
The science has proven it too. Laboratory research has demonstrated measurable connective tissue responses to well-placed acupuncture needle manipulation, including fibroblast responses and changes in tissue architecture and modeling.
That doesn’t mean acupuncture magically breaks up fascia. There is no magic here, it is a medical technique with intentional manipulation and your body responding. This is medicine.
It actually means there are legitimate biological mechanisms deserving of more investigation into acupuncture as a treatment for conditions involving connective tissue and myofascial pain.
Acupuncture Has Clinical Evidence for Myofascial Pain
This is where science and evidence become particularly intriguing.
In a 2024 systematic review of studies and an extensive meta-analysis evaluated 10 randomized controlled trials involving 852 patients with myofascial pain syndrome.
The researchers of the meta-analysis found acupuncture was associated with significant reduction in pain compared to control treatments in the study.
The average additional improvement was approximately 1.3 points on a 0–10 visual analog pain scale; that is a drug-free, non-addictive, positive response.
That’s a very different story from simply saying, “patients say acupuncture works.” Empirical evidence is powerful, especially since we have thousands of years with billions of positive reports to support the efficacy of acupuncture.
However, adding millions of testimonies to new, randomized clinical trials examining acupuncture specifically for myofascial pain shows even more robust and powerful proof that acupuncture works for pain and myofascial pain specifically.
The research is never perfect, just with all studies. Acupuncture protocols differ considerably between studies, because different patterns and different types of pain require different combinations of acupuncture points. We always welcome larger, and higher-quality trials are often needed. But this does not negate the evidence that supports acupuncture as a reasonable treatment option for myofascial pain.
Acupuncture Does More Than Simply Affect the Tissue Around the Acupuncture Needle
One of the biggest misconceptions about acupuncture is that its effect is purely mechanical and local.
It isn’t.
Acupuncture stimulates sensory nerves and produces effects within both the peripheral and central nervous systems affecting the entire mind and body.
Research for acupuncture analgesia has identified several mechanisms that may contribute to pain relief, including modulation of pain signaling and endogenous pain-control systems. Dr. Burris was the chief acupuncturist in a dental analgesia acupuncture study at University of California San Diego UCSD in 2000. She witnessed first hand the profound impact acupuncture had on pain management for those undergoing tooth extractions.
This is important proof for those who suffer from chronic pain.
After patients have been suffering for months, years, or even decades, pain isn’t necessarily just about one damaged muscle or one irritated piece of fascia. The nervous system itself can become increasingly responsive and even overreactive to painful input from our brain and the injury.
Effective treatment therefore may need to address both the painful tissue and the sensitive nervous system that is interpreting those signals.
Acupuncture is particularly interesting because it can potentially influence both for a quicker and more effective pain control.
Trigger Points Matter Too
Many people with chronic “fascial pain” also have myofascial trigger points. These are hyperirritable areas within the muscle belly that can produce both local and referred pain throughout the body. Both Mr. Tony Burris, LAc, MSTOM and Dr. Kristen Burris have been thoroughly trained in trigger point acupuncture needle techniques and musculoskeletal treatments.
This is an area where acupuncture becomes very practical and anatomically specific.
Instead of treating only the location where a patient feels pain, an experienced acupuncturist can evaluate and assess other locations that can be contributing factors to the level of pain experienced by evaluating:
Trigger points
Motor points
Muscle guarding
Referred-pain patterns
Agonist and antagonist muscle relationships
Compensatory muscle patterns
Distal acupuncture points for more advanced pain management
Nervous-system regulation and a whole body/mind reset
Sometimes the most important acupuncture treatment is not directly where it hurts in the body, in fact, that can often make pain syndromes and injuries worse. This is where acupuncture shines well above dry needling counterparts who only know to needle where it hurts. Remember in Idaho, PT’s are only required to have 27 hours of needle training whereas acupuncturists are the needling experts and are required YEARS of needling training, practice, mentorship, internships and board exams all about needling in order to legally needle patients. Who holds the needle, matters.
Traditional Chinese Medicine has used distal acupuncture points and contralateral treatment strategies for thousands of years. Modern acupuncture can combine these sophisticated traditional acupuncture approaches with our contemporary understanding of anatomy, neurology, motor points, and myofascial trigger points for the most comprehensive pain and injury management.
What About People with hEDS and Hypermobility?
This is where treatment needs to be thoughtful, carefully planned and gently administered. This is not the time for aggressive needle techniques. This is the time for gentle, careful and simplified treatment strategies.
A person with hypermobility may already have ligaments and connective tissues that provide less joint stability with more inflammation.
Their muscles may overly compensate by becoming chronically guarded and tight in an attempt to stabilize an otherwise unstable anatomical interaction.
Therefore, the goal should not necessarily be:
“Loosen everything.”
Instead, treatment should be individualized and thoughtfully orchestrated. The goal is to reduce painful muscle guarding and relax trigger points while preserving the muscular support needed for joint stability.
It is important to distinguish between treating symptoms associated with hEDS and treating hEDS itself… the language seems interchangeable, but the truth is, that differentiation matters.
Acupuncture does not change the underlying genetic connective-tissue disorder: that is an inherited, lifelong problem.
But that does not mean it cannot help some of the musculoskeletal pain that accompanies hypermobility immensely offering a new lease on life, a more active lifestyle and a non-addictive approach to pain management.
What About Supplements That Claim to “Release Fascia”?
This is an important discussion.
There are supplements currently being marketed with claims that certain nutrients or enzymes can “release,” “rehydrate,” or normalize fascia.
Some individual ingredients in these products have legitimate research behind them for various purposes.
But that is not the same thing as demonstrating in clinical trials that swallowing a particular supplement releases abnormal fascia or corrects the underlying fascial abnormalities of hEDS.
When evaluating the effectiveness of these supplements, it is imperative to evaluate:
A clearly defined biological mechanism to back the claim
Human clinical trials on the actual finished product, not just one active ingredient
Appropriate placebo or control groups in the studies
Clinically meaningful outcomes, not just a tiny improvement
Independent replication of the studies findings
Peer-reviewed publication that was not funded by the supplement company themselves
Testimonials can be interesting, sometimes valuable, sometimes powerful. But they are not clinical trials and that matters.
So, Can Acupuncture “Release Fascia”?
I would honestly phrase the question differently.
I would ask, “Can acupuncture alleviate significant pain associated with fascia”? And the answer to that is a resounding yes, in most cases, absolutely, yes.
There is strong evidence that acupuncture needles mechanically interact positively with connective tissue, and additionally, there is clinical evidence supporting acupuncture for myofascial pain.
Acupuncture may also influence positively trigger points, muscle tone, peripheral sensory input, and the nervous system’s processing of pain throughout the body.
These are measurable and biologically plausible mechanisms proving the efficacy of acupuncture.
We don’t need to claim that acupuncture “melts fascia” or “releases fascia” or permanently remodels connective tissue to explain why a patient with myofascial pain may feel substantially better following treatment.
The science is already proof enough.
The Bottom Line:
Fascia is far more biologically active than we once understood, and the relationship between our fascia, muscle, nerves, body movement, and chronic pain continues to be an exciting area of research with acupuncture being the leading treatment option for sufferers.
For people experiencing chronic muscle tightness, trigger point pain, myofascial pain, or pain associated with hypermobility, acupuncture deserves serious consideration as part of a comprehensive treatment plan. I would suggest it as a first line of defense against this type of pain.
And unlike many of the new buzz products being marketed specifically for “fascial release,” acupuncture already has randomized clinical research showing its positive effects on myofascial pain.
At Eagle Acupuncture, Dr. Kristen Burris, DAcCHM, and Tony Burris, L.Ac., MSTOM, combine Traditional Chinese Medicine with modern anatomical approaches to chronic pain, including acupuncture, motor-point and trigger-point techniques, cupping, and gua sha.
Treatment is individualized because chronic pain is rarely as simple as treating the spot that hurts.
Eagle Acupuncture | Eagle, Idaho
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