It happened on a Sunday afternoon in Bedford, during a recreational soccer game Marcus had been playing in for six years.

He planted his left foot, turned to cut right, and felt something give in his inner thigh. Not a pop, not a tear, just a deep pull that made him stop mid-stride and stand very still for a moment, deciding whether to walk it off or call it a day.

He walked it off. He finished the game.

He did not play again for eight months.  

What a Groin Pull Becomes When It Doesn’t Heal

The first two weeks, Marcus did everything right. He rested. He iced. He stayed off the field and took the anti-inflammatory medication his primary care physician in Woburn prescribed. The acute pain in his inner thigh settled, as expected.

What did not settle was everything else.

A dull ache had moved into his lower groin, persistent and low-grade, impossible to ignore during long drives or extended periods of sitting at his desk. And then, about three weeks after the injury, something new appeared: a heaviness and intermittent pain in his left testicle that had no obvious explanation.

He went back to his doctor. He was examined, referred to a urologist in Waltham, had an ultrasound. No structural abnormality. No infection. The urologist was thorough and honest: the testicular discomfort was likely referred pain traveling along the same nerve pathways affected by the groin injury. It was not uncommon. It would probably resolve as the injury healed.

It did not resolve.

Marcus saw a sports medicine specialist in Lexington who confirmed the groin strain and prescribed a structured physical therapy program. He completed it. His range of motion improved. The sharp pull in his inner thigh faded to a manageable tightness. But the ache in his lower groin persisted, and the testicular pain came and went on its own schedule, unconnected to anything he could identify.

“I had three different doctors who all agreed on what it was,” Marcus said. “Nobody had a clear answer for why it wasn’t getting better.”

He stopped playing soccer. He stopped going to the Saturday morning pickup basketball games in Billerica he had joined the previous year. He started declining things without fully explaining why, because explaining meant describing testicular pain to people he didn’t know well enough for that conversation, and he was tired of having it with the people he did.

The thing nobody talks about with this kind of injury is the way it quietly shrinks a life. The field, the games, the physical outlet he had relied on for stress, all of it went away, and nothing came in to replace it. By month six, Marcus was not in acute pain. He was just diminished. Stuck at a level of function that was better than the worst of it and nowhere near where he wanted to be.

The Conversation at Work

A colleague at his Billerica office mentioned Acupuncture & Wellness Clinic in Burlington after overhearing Marcus decline yet another lunch invitation because sitting in a restaurant booth for an hour had become uncomfortable.

Marcus’s reaction was direct: he had a sports medicine specialist and a urologist. He was not looking to add another opinion. His colleague, who had been treated at AWC for a nerve condition, told him to at least look at the website.

Marcus looked at the website that evening. He called the following week, not because he was optimistic, but because eight months was long enough.

His first appointment with Dr. Min Jeon was not what he had come to expect from medical visits. She asked him to walk her through the full timeline of the injury, not just the current symptoms. She was interested in the progression: when the testicular pain had appeared, what it felt like relative to the groin ache, whether there were positions or movements that changed it. She explained the nerve pathways involved in groin injuries with a clarity that made the referred pain pattern make sense for the first time.

She described how, with injuries like his, the soft tissue heals at its own pace but the surrounding nerve and connective tissue can remain sensitized and reactive long after the acute phase is over. The body holds a kind of guarded tension in the area that conventional physical therapy doesn’t always fully resolve. Her treatment plan addressed that directly, working on the nerve sensitivity and the deep tissue patterns that had settled in over eight months of compensating and protecting the injury.

She also used ATP Resonance BioTherapy®, a low-level electrical frequency treatment that helps reduce inflammation and supports tissue repair at the cellular level.

Marcus was not convinced it would work. He came back the following week.

The Sunday He Went Back

Nine weeks into treatment, Marcus returned to his soccer league for the first time.

He told the team he was easing back in, that he wasn’t sure how his body would respond. He played thirty minutes. He planted his left foot. He cut right.

Nothing gave.

The groin was tight in the way any returning muscle is tight, but the deep ache that had been his baseline for eight months was gone. The testicular pain, which had visited reliably every few days for the better part of a year, had not appeared in three weeks.

At his next appointment with his sports medicine specialist in Lexington, she reviewed his movement and noted the significant improvement. She asked what he had added to his recovery. He told her about AWC. She was genuinely interested, asked a few follow-up questions, and told him to keep going.

He still checks in with his urologist annually. He still works with his sports medicine team. AWC is part of the picture now, not a replacement for any of it. But he was back on the field, and that was the only measure that had ever really mattered to him.

For men across Greater Boston dealing with a groin pull that won’t fully resolve, or testicular pain that specialists have evaluated and can’t clearly explain, Marcus’s experience is worth a conversation.

If groin pain, referred testicular discomfort, or a sports injury that hasn’t healed on schedule has been keeping you off the field, Dr. Min Jeon is ready to help. Call Acupuncture & Wellness Clinic at 781-221-0162 or schedule online at awclinic.com.

Acupuncture & Wellness Clinic | Burlington, MA | Serving Greater Boston including Bedford, Woburn, Waltham, Lexington, and Billerica | Specializing in groin injuries, referred pain, sports recovery, and complex musculoskeletal conditions for over 25 years.

The morning it started for real, my four-year-old ran at me in the kitchen the way she does every day, arms wide, full speed, and I flinched backward into the counter to keep her from touching my left side. She stopped. She looked up at me, confused and a little hurt, and asked why Mommy did not want a hug. I did not have an answer that a four-year-old could understand. The shingles rash on my ribs had healed weeks earlier. The pain had not left with it. It had moved in.

That is what no one tells you about postherpetic neuralgia. The blisters scab over, everyone assumes you are fine, and meanwhile the nerves underneath keep screaming long after there is anything left to see.

A house full of people I could not touch

I was thirty-four with three children in Burlington, and I built my whole day around not being touched. I wore the loosest shirts I owned and still the fabric brushing my side made me catch my breath. Seatbelts were a negotiation. Carrying my youngest on my hip, the thing I had done without thinking for years, became impossible. I started asking my older two to climb into their car seats themselves and felt like a failure every single time.

Nighttime was the worst. The pain seemed to wait until the house went quiet and then it would build, this burning electric ache wrapping around my ribs, and I would lie there not sleeping while everyone else did. My husband would reach for me in the dark and I would move his hand away. I missed being held. I missed being a mother who could scoop up a crying kid without bracing for the cost.

I did everything my doctors asked. I saw my primary care physician, then a neurologist in Greater Boston. I tried the nerve medications, the ones that left me foggy and slow in the middle of chasing three children. I tried the patches, the creams, a different prescription, then another. Some took the edge off for an hour. Nothing made it stop. Months passed. I started to quietly accept that this was just my life now.

The neighbor who would not let it go

It was a neighbor in Lexington, a woman whose own mother had been treated for nerve pain, who kept bringing up a clinic in Burlington. I brushed her off more than once. I had already done the real medicine, the specialists, the prescriptions. I did not believe acupuncture was going to touch something my neurologist could barely manage. I went, honestly, so I could tell her I tried it and move on.

Then I met Dr. Min Jeon, and the appointment did not go the way I expected. She did not glance at her clock or talk over me. She sat down and asked me questions no one had asked, about exactly where the pain lived, what made it flare, how I was sleeping, how I was coping with three kids while feeling like this. She listened to all of it. When she explained what she was seeing in plain language, nothing confusing, nothing I needed to decode, I understood my own body better than I had in months. She told me part of my care would use ATP Resonance BioTherapy®, gentle low-level frequencies meant to calm the inflamed nerves and support healing. And she was clear that she would work right alongside my neurologist, not in place of the care I was already getting.

The first time I picked her up without flinching

I did not wake up cured. That is not how it went. But a few weeks into seeing Dr. Min, driving in from home and sometimes past Woburn and Billerica on the way, I noticed the nights were quieter. The burning that used to peak at midnight had dulled to something I could sleep through.

Then came the morning my four-year-old ran at me again, arms wide, full speed. And this time I did not flinch. I caught her and I lifted her up onto my hip, that left side that had been off limits for the better part of a year, and I held her there. She wrapped her arms around my neck and had no idea she was giving her mother back something enormous. I stood in the kitchen and cried into her hair while she asked what was wrong.

When I went back to my neurologist, she looked at how much I had backed off the medication and asked what had changed. I told her about Dr. Min and the clinic in Burlington. She wanted the details written down. She told me to keep going.

I am not going to oversell this. My doctors still manage my care, and they should. But for the first time since the rash healed, I am not organizing my entire life around avoiding my own children. For any young parent across Greater Boston living with postherpetic neuralgia and quietly running out of hope, I needed you to hear that there was more to try.

If postherpetic neuralgia or stubborn nerve pain is stealing the moments that matter, you do not have to keep enduring it alone. Call Acupuncture & Wellness Clinic at 781-221-0162 or schedule online at awclinic.com.

Acupuncture & Wellness Clinic | Burlington, MA | Serving Greater Boston including Woburn, Lexington, Billerica, and Bedford | Specializing in postherpetic neuralgia, nerve pain, shingles recovery, and complex cases for over 25 years.

The wedding invitation was magneted to our refrigerator in Burlington, the dates circled in red, the flights to Rome already booked. And there I was at six in the morning, frozen on the edge of the mattress, one sock half on, my lower back locked up so tight that bending forward felt like a knife turning. My husband heard me and came in. I told him what I had been afraid to say out loud for two weeks. I did not think I could make the trip. I thought we might have to cancel.

This was not how I pictured the lead-up to my only daughter’s wedding. 

Counting down to a trip I was dreading

The back pain had crept in over the spring and then dug in for good. By the time the wedding was six weeks out, it ran my entire day. I measured everything by what it would cost my back. Loading the dishwasher. Reaching for a glass on the top shelf. Sitting through a movie. Sleep was a joke. I would find one position that did not hurt and lie perfectly still, afraid to move and lose it.

What scared me was the trip itself. Six weeks in Europe, the wedding in Italy and then time in France and Spain, the trip my husband and I had been planning for two years. And all I could think about was the eight-hour flight in a cramped seat, the cobblestones, the standing through a ceremony, the dragging of a suitcase through train stations. I pictured myself stuck in a hotel room while everyone else celebrated. I started rehearsing how I would tell my daughter I might not be there to watch her walk down the aisle. That was the moment it stopped being about pain and became about something I could not bear to lose.

I was doing what my doctor advised. My primary care physician in Greater Boston had me on anti-inflammatories, sent me to physical therapy, ordered the imaging. The therapy helped a little. The pills took the edge off and left my stomach raw. Nothing was moving fast enough. The clock on the refrigerator kept counting down and my back was not getting the message.

A coworker who would not stop bringing it up

A coworker who lives in Woburn had been telling me for weeks about a clinic in Burlington that helped her after her own back went out. I kept nodding and not going. I had already done the real medical route, the doctor and the imaging and the therapy. I did not see how acupuncture was going to fix in six weeks what all of that had not. I finally booked an appointment mostly so I could say I had tried everything before I gave up on the trip.

The first visit with Dr. Min Jeon Lic.Ac. D.Ac. did not go how I expected. She did not hurry. She sat down and asked me questions no one had asked, about when exactly the pain flared, how I slept, how I sat at my desk, what the trip meant to me and why I was so afraid of it. She listened to the whole thing. When she explained what she was seeing in plain words, nothing complicated, nothing I needed a dictionary for, I understood my own back better than I had in months. She told me one part of my care would use ATP Resonance BioTherapy®, gentle low-level frequencies meant to lower inflammation and help the tissue settle. And she was clear from the start that she would work alongside my doctor and my physical therapist, not replace them.

The morning I put my own socks on

I am not going to tell you it vanished overnight. It did not. But I kept seeing Dr. Min twice a week, driving in past Lexington and Woburn, and the mornings slowly stopped being the enemy. The locked-up panic eased. I could bend to the dishwasher. I could sleep more than two hours at a stretch.

Then came the morning, about ten days before our flight, when I sat on the edge of the bed and put both socks on without a sound. No gasp. No knife. I just did it, the way I had for forty years without thinking, and then I sat there stunned. My husband asked what was wrong. Nothing was wrong. That was the point.

When I saw my primary care doctor for my pre-trip check, she looked at how much I had backed off the medication and asked what I had changed. I told her about Dr. Min and the clinic in Burlington. She wrote it down and told me to keep it up.

We made the trip. I stood through my daughter’s wedding in Italy and walked the cobblestones and danced, carefully, but I danced. For anyone across Greater Boston staring down a deadline with their back holding them hostage, I needed you to know there was more to try before you cancel the thing that matters most.

If back pain is forcing you to give up the moments you have been waiting for, you do not have to surrender them. Call Acupuncture & Wellness Clinic at 781-221-0162 or schedule online at awclinic.com.

Acupuncture & Wellness Clinic | Burlington, MA | Serving Greater Boston including Woburn, Lexington, Billerica, and Bedford | Specializing in back pain, sciatica, chronic pain, and complex cases for over 25 years.

The seventh test sat on the bathroom counter in our Woburn home, and I would not look at it. I sat on the cold tile floor with my back against the tub, knees pulled to my chest, and counted to three hundred. I had learned not to hope. Hope was the thing that broke me each time, so I had stopped letting myself feel it. When I finally turned the test over and saw the two lines, I did not cry with joy. I cried because I was certain I was about to lose another one.

By then I had been pregnant six times in four years. Six positive tests. Six early ultrasounds where the room went quiet. Six drives home where my husband held my hand at every red light and neither of us said a word.

The years I stopped planning a future

People who have not lived through recurrent miscarriage do not understand what it does to ordinary days. I stopped buying anything. Not a onesie, not a name book, not a single thing that admitted I believed a baby might come. I avoided the baby aisle at the grocery store in Burlington and took the long way around through household goods. When friends announced their pregnancies, I smiled and meant it and then sat in my car in the parking lot and shook.

My body felt like a place that kept saying no. Every doctor ran tests. My OB in Greater Boston was thorough and kind, the fertility specialist was excellent, and still the answers came back as a shrug. No clear cause. “Unexplained.” That word followed me everywhere. I was thirty-six and running out of the one thing nobody could give me back, which was time. I started declining baby showers. I stopped telling my mother when I was pregnant because I could not bear to also be the one who told her it was over. The grief was not one large grief. It was a hundred small ones, stacked.

The conversation in my sister’s kitchen

It was my sister, in her kitchen in Lexington, who said the thing I did not want to hear. She had watched me lose pregnancy after pregnancy, and one afternoon she put a mug of tea in front of me and said she had read about a clinic in Burlington that worked with women in exactly my situation. Acupuncture. I almost laughed. I had been through reproductive endocrinology, genetic testing, blood thinners, progesterone. I did not believe a few needles were going to succeed where medicine had not.

I went mostly to stop her from worrying. That is the honest truth.

What I did not expect was the first appointment with Dr. Min Jeon. She did not rush me. She sat down and asked me questions no one had asked in four years. Not just about my cycles and my labs, but about my sleep, my digestion, the stress I had been carrying since the first loss, the way my body had felt different after each pregnancy. She listened the way you listen to someone whose story actually matters to you. When she explained what she was noticing, she used plain words, nothing mysterious, nothing I needed a translator for. She told me she could not promise me anything, and somehow that honesty made me trust her more than any guarantee would have. She explained that one part of my care would use ATP Resonance BioTherapy®, gentle low-level frequencies meant to lower inflammation and support my body’s own healing. Then she told me the most important thing: she would work alongside my fertility team, never instead of them.

The first ultrasound I did not have to mourn

I kept seeing Dr. Min through the months before that seventh pregnancy, and I kept seeing her after. I drove in from Woburn twice a week, sometimes past clinics and offices in Billerica and Bedford where I had once gotten bad news, and for the first time those drives did not feel like dread.

The morning of the eight-week ultrasound, I lay on the table and braced for the silence. Instead the technician smiled and turned the screen toward me, and there it was. A heartbeat. Fast and steady and real. I heard it fill the room. I had never made it this far. My fertility specialist looked at my chart, looked at me, and asked what I had been doing differently. I told her about Dr. Min and the clinic in Burlington. She wrote it down. She said whatever I was doing, I should keep doing it.

I am not going to tell you acupuncture is magic, because Dr. Min would never let me say that. My doctors managed my pregnancy. My medications mattered. But something in me steadied during those months, and I carried that baby past every milestone I had never reached before.

My daughter is asleep down the hall as I write this. For anyone across Greater Boston sitting on a bathroom floor right now, certain that hope is the enemy, I want you to know there was a version of me who believed that too.

If you are facing recurrent miscarriage or unexplained fertility struggles, you do not have to navigate it alone. Call Acupuncture & Wellness Clinic at 781-221-0162 or schedule online at awclinic.com.

Acupuncture & Wellness Clinic | Burlington, MA | Serving Greater Boston including Woburn, Lexington, Billerica, and Bedford | Specializing in recurrent miscarriage, fertility support, women’s health, and complex cases for over 25 years.

I remember the exact week it stopped being just a back problem.

I’d been managing sciatica for nearly three years. The familiar electric shot down my left leg, the stiffness that greeted me every morning like an unwelcome houseguest. I’d built my life around it. I knew which chairs to avoid, which positions to sleep in, how long I could sit in a car before needing to stop and walk. I had, in the way that chronic pain patients do, negotiated a kind of exhausted truce with my body.

Then the pain moved north.

The tension that had been living in my lower back began climbing into my hips, up through my mid-spine, settling into my neck and shoulders with a grip that nothing could loosen. By the time I was 51, I was waking up at 2 a.m. with my neck locked at an angle, my shoulders burning, and no position that gave me more than forty minutes of unbroken sleep. Not on my back, not on my side, not propped with every pillow in the house.

I was exhausted in a way that rest couldn’t touch. And I was running out of ways to explain to the people around me why.

When Your Body Stops Being Yours

My name is David. I live in Bedford, and I work in operations management, a job that requires me to be sharp, present, and decisive. For the better part of two years, I was none of those things before noon.

The insomnia was the piece that finally broke me. The sciatica I had learned to absorb. The neck stiffness I managed with heat packs and careful positioning. But the sleeplessness undid everything else. I was surviving on four and five broken hours a night, dragging myself through mornings on caffeine, making errors at work I wouldn’t have made in my thirties, snapping at my wife over things that didn’t deserve it.

I saw my primary care physician, who referred me to an orthopedic specialist. The specialist reviewed my imaging and confirmed what I already knew. Multilevel disc involvement, some nerve impingement, the kind of structural picture that explained the sciatica but not fully the cascade of symptoms that had followed it north. He recommended continued physical therapy and a muscle relaxant for the sleep. The muscle relaxant left me foggy and didn’t address the underlying tension. I stopped taking it after three weeks.

My physical therapist, who I’d been seeing in Woburn for over a year, suggested I speak to someone about the broader picture. The relationship between the sciatica, the compensatory tension in my neck and shoulders, and the sleep disruption. She mentioned Acupuncture & Wellness Clinic (AWC) in Burlington, MA, and specifically Min K. Jeon, Lic.Ac., DAC. She said she’d had other patients go and come back reporting things had shifted in ways PT alone hadn’t managed.

I was not immediately convinced. I am a practical person. I had tried most of what conventional medicine had to offer for this particular combination of problems, and I was open to something different, but cautiously, skeptically open.

She Connected the Dots

My first appointment with Min ran nearly an hour. She asked about the timeline, not just when the sciatica started, but when the neck involvement began, whether the shoulder tension was bilateral or one-sided, how the sleep disruption had evolved over time. She asked about my stress levels at work, how I held tension in my body during a difficult day, whether my jaw was tight when I woke.

She explained what she was seeing in terms I could follow immediately. The body, when managing unresolved pain in one region, begins recruiting surrounding structures to compensate. My neck and shoulders hadn’t developed a separate problem. They had been quietly overworking for years to protect my compromised lower spine, and the chronic tension that resulted had created the conditions for the kind of sleep disruption that no muscle relaxant was going to solve, because the source wasn’t chemical. It was structural, neurological, and cumulative.

Acupuncture, she explained, works on multiple levels simultaneously, interrupting pain signals, releasing the deep muscular tension that had accumulated across my entire spine, and influencing the nervous system in ways that create the conditions for genuine restorative sleep. She also incorporated ATP Resonance BioTherapy® into my sessions, a treatment using precise low-level electrical frequencies to reduce inflammation along the nerve pathways and improve circulation to the affected tissue.

No one had ever explained my situation as a single connected picture before. Every previous appointment had addressed one piece of it. Min addressed all of it at once.

The Morning I Woke Up at 6:47

Five weeks into treatment, twice weekly sessions to start, I woke up on a Thursday morning and looked at my phone. 6:47 a.m. I had slept from 10:30 p.m. to 6:47 a.m. without waking once. I lay there for a moment checking myself, the way you do when something unexpected happens that you don’t want to jinx by acknowledging too quickly.

The neck stiffness was there, reduced but present. The sciatica was quieter than it had been in months. But it was the sleep that told me something had genuinely shifted.

By week eight, I was sleeping six to seven hours consistently. The shoulder burning that had woken me nightly had downgraded to a dull morning ache that loosened within the first hour of being up. My wife noticed before I said anything. She mentioned one morning over coffee that I seemed like myself again. That landed harder than I expected.

Three months in, my orthopedic specialist reviewed new imaging at a follow-up and noted that the muscle tension patterns he’d observed previously had reduced meaningfully. He asked what I’d added to my routine. When I mentioned AWC in Burlington, he was familiar with it. He’d had other patients from the Lexington and Billerica area mention Min specifically.

I still do physical therapy. I still see my orthopedic team. What AWC gave me was the piece that connected everything else and made it work. The ability to sleep, to recover, to arrive at each day with enough in reserve to actually live it.

If you’re somewhere in Greater Boston, in Bedford, Woburn, Lexington, Billerica, or Waltham, managing a pain picture that has expanded beyond its original location and started costing you your sleep, your sharpness, your patience, your ordinary life, I want you to know that the full picture can be treated. Not just managed piece by piece, but treated as what it actually is: one connected problem with one connected solution.

AWC helped me find that. Four years of fragmented treatment, and one practitioner who finally saw the whole thing.

Your sleep and your life are worth reclaiming. Call Acupuncture & Wellness Clinic at 781-221-0162 or 

Acupuncture & Wellness Clinic | Burlington, MA | Serving Greater Boston including Woburn, Lexington, Billerica, Waltham, and Bedford | Specializing in sciatica, chronic pain, insomnia, neck and shoulder tension, and complex cases for over 25 years.