For three years, I started every morning the same way — rolling carefully to the edge of the bed, planting my feet on the floor, and just sitting there. Waiting. Waiting to find out how bad it was going to be that day. Some mornings, the pain down my left leg was a dull throb I could mostly ignore. Other days, it was electric. Sharp. The kind that made me grip the doorframe just walking to the bathroom.
I’m 44. I work a desk job in Manchester, NH — eight, sometimes nine hours a day in front of a screen. I used to think back pain was something you just accumulated, like gray hairs or a longer commute. By the time the sciatica set in, radiating from my lower back all the way through my left hip and down to my calf, I’d accepted that this was just who I was now. The guy who couldn’t sit through a movie. The dad who said “I can’t” when his kids wanted to throw a baseball around the yard.
| The Appointments That Weren’t Working
I did what most people do. I went to my primary care doctor. She referred me to physical therapy. I did PT dutifully for two months — the exercises, the heat packs, the stretching routines. It helped, a little, for a while. Then a stressful week at work would come and I’d be back to square one. My doctor mentioned injections. I mentioned I’d really like to avoid that if possible. The conversation kind of stalled there.
My wife had been reading about acupuncture for back pain and started sending me articles. My reaction, honestly? Skeptical. I’m an engineer. I like things I can measure. Needles in your back fixing a nerve problem sounded like something you’d read about in a magazine at the airport, not something that would actually work for the specific, grinding, radiating pain I was dealing with every day.
But after a particularly rough week — I couldn’t make it through my daughter’s school play without shifting and wincing every ten minutes — I told my wife I’d try anything.
| Finding Trend Acupuncture in Concord
A colleague from our Bedford office had mentioned Trend Acupuncture to me offhand months earlier. She’d gone for something different — migraines, I think — and wouldn’t stop talking about this practitioner named Kristen Markwith. I’d filed it away and forgotten about it. That night, after the school play, I went looking.
Trend is in Concord, NH, which was about a 30-minute drive for me. Not nothing, but I’d driven further for a good mechanic. What caught my attention on their website wasn’t just the acupuncture — it was that Kristen Markwith, who has her Doctorate in Acupuncture and 14 years of practice, specifically works with complex chronic cases. People who’d tried other things. People who felt stuck. That was the language I needed to read.
I called and booked an appointment. I told myself I’d give it six sessions and see.
| What Treatment Actually Felt Like
The first thing that surprised me about Kristen was how long she actually talked to me before doing anything. She wanted to know everything — not just where the pain was, but how I slept, how stressed I was at work, what I ate, what my mornings looked like. She talked about how the body holds tension in interconnected ways, and by the time she started explaining what she was going to do and why, I found myself actually following along instead of just nodding politely.
“I found myself actually following along instead of just nodding politely — which, if you know me, is not nothing.”
The acupuncture itself wasn’t what I expected. I’d braced for something uncomfortable, but the needles — and there were several placed along my lumbar region, hip, and down my leg — produced this strange, almost releasing sensation. Not pain. More like pressure that slowly unwound.
After my third session, Kristen introduced something called ATP Resonance BioTherapy®, a low-level electrical frequency treatment that works to reduce inflammation and improve circulation at the cellular level. She explained it simply: it’s essentially sending targeted signals to the tissues that are stuck in a chronic inflammatory state, helping them reset. The session with it added maybe 20 minutes, and I walked out feeling looser than I had in years.
I’m also going to mention something that felt small but wasn’t: Kristen remembered details from my previous sessions without looking at her notes. She asked about a specific work project I’d mentioned being stressed about. She adjusted what she was doing based on how I was presenting that day. That kind of attention is not something I’d ever experienced in a medical setting before. People come to her from all over — I’ve run into folks in the waiting room from Salem and Londonderry — and she somehow still makes you feel like your case is the one she’s been thinking about.
| What’s Different Now
I won’t tell you I’m cured, because Kristen would probably wince at that word and so would I. What I’ll tell you is that by session six, I stopped gripping the doorframe in the morning. By session eight, I drove to my parents’ house in southern New Hampshire — two hours — and walked in without immediately needing to find a chair.
Last month, I threw a baseball with my son in the backyard for 45 minutes. Forty-five minutes. I had to sit down afterwards, but I did it without the electric shooting pain that used to make that kind of thing unthinkable. My wife cried a little when I told her. I’m not going to say I didn’t either.
I still go to Trend about twice a month for maintenance. The sciatica flares occasionally — usually when work is bad and I’m not keeping up with the stretching — but it doesn’t own my mornings anymore. That’s the only way I know how to put it.
If you’re somewhere in the southern NH area — Manchester, Bedford, or anywhere reasonable distance from Concord — and you’ve been doing the rounds with conventional options without finding your footing, I’d genuinely recommend calling Trend. Not because I’ve become someone who recommends acupuncture to everyone. But because this was the thing that actually worked, and I spent three years not knowing that.
