Has anyone ever had acupuncture for typical or a typical TN? I had a MVD back in January but I am starting to have "atypical" pains now on top of starting to have typical pains on the other side of my face. They aren't anything insane like it was before I had surgery but I dont ever wanna be in that place of my life again and have a feeling once summer and the warm weather passes it will be back like crazy because the cold was so horrible on my TN. I am taking gabapentin but my mom and sister thought I should try something new and bought this for me so of course I will try but wanted to get some advice from fellow TN sufferers.

any and all comments are welcome!! thank you all!

I have never tried accupuncture for anything but I know several people who have used it for a variety of conditions and they swear by it, but they also say you need to see someone who is trained in the traditional methods and preferably from the far east. This is all I can share about it.

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.