I have seen quite a few patients now with chronic tail bone pain. The medical term for this is coccydynia. The common causes are childbirth and trauma, and women tend to have this condition more often than men. The usual story is that the patient fell backwards onto their bottom and it’s been hurting ever since, or that the pain started after childbirth ‘for no good reason’. The common thread with all of my coccydynia patients is that they put up with it because they don’t think there is any treatment! Nothing is further from the truth.
The conventional treatment is to use a donut cushion and simple pain killers initially. Often in the acute phase, this is all that is required. If however it becomes chronic pain, then one could consider an imaging guided steroid injection. The procedure of last resort the surgical removal of the tail bone (coccygectomy). Coccydynia is one of the few musculoskeletal conditions where physiotherapy does appear to be effective. Based on my experiences, acupuncture is highly effective for chronic rather than acute coccydynia. Acupuncture is one of the best, if not the best, treatment for nerve pain. My success in treatment of chronic coccydynia with acupuncture, I believe, implies that it may be a type of nerve pain rather than a typical musculoskeletal pain.
I treated a 56 year old lady with chronic coccydynia for about 30 years. It occured after the birth of her last child. She would always find it painful to sit on a chair for prolonged periods of time. She tried the usual conservative treatments except steroid injection. She did not like the idea of a steroid injection to her tail bone. Only a single facial acupuncture point was required. Of course, I elected to use laser acupuncture rather than needle (both work well!). After the first week, her pain improved by 80%. By the second treatment, her pain was virtually gone!
So for anyone out there with chronic tail bone pain. You don’t have to put up with it! Acupuncture offers a potentially dare-I-say curable treatment.
Addendum:
There is a subset of people with coccydynia who are very difficult to treat and they are people with concomitant chronic pelvic pain. I can write another whole article on chronic pelvic pain as it is a massive topic. These particular patients need very slow and gentle treatment and a treatment course may last for months to even years.
