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.