I used acupuncture for quite awhile before my MVD. When I could go weekly it seemed to keep the pain from escalating, but as soon as I needed to skip a week or two because of traveling, the pain would escalate and I'd have to increase my Tegretol. Resuming acupuncture wouldn't help me decrease the meds though it would hold me steady till I skipped weeks again. So it is worth a try.

Over the years I have tried four different people for acupuncture. I thought I preferred someone with an eastern perspective on how it works but the two I tried I found hard to communicate with, though for somewhat different reasons. The first one was not a doctor but an American trained and certified in acupuncture. He was hard to understand because he talked in new-age terms about what he was doing; the second was a doctor trained as a child in China and she couldn't speak English very well. The best experience I had was with an American family doctor of Indian descent. He didn't talk in terms of "chi" but he communicated well about what he was doing, and I was confident that he understood me medically. So you might want to try several kinds of acupuncturists if at first you aren't satisfied with the experience.