Dealing With Headaches? A New Study Says Acupuncture May Help

July 6, 2022 – Dena Ressler, a New Jersey-based retiree in her 60s, had a “splitting headache” that lasted 3 months. It got here with a cough and shortness of breath. After critical medical circumstances had been dominated out, it was discovered that her headache was stress-related.

“It was constant, scary, and it didn’t go away,” she remembers.

Ressler is a clarinet participant with a band that performs Klezmer music, a conventional style of the Ashkenazi Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. After weeks of ache, she determined to strive acupuncture. And after 3 weeks of standard appointments, the headache disappeared and has not returned.

“Every once in a while, when I’m really tired, I can feel the same pathway of pain in my head – maybe once every month or two – but it’s very slight,” she says.

This wasn’t the primary time Ressler had used acupuncture. Several many years in the past, when she was in her 30s, she had a extreme harm that made her much less capable of get round.

“It took 18 months to get to where I am now – almost fully functional,” she says. “Although I can no longer ride my bike and I still have to be careful not to overdo things, I can do my own yardwork and was able to return to playing the clarinet.”

Scientific Research Supports Acupuncture

According to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, acupuncture could also be an affordable choice for individuals with persistent ache (together with migraine or tension-type complications), offered the acupuncturist is skilled, well-trained, and makes use of sterile needles.

Chinese researchers not too long ago launched outcomes of a brand new research that checked out 218 sufferers with persistent tension-type complications. Most had had complications for 11 years and had been having a mean of 21 headache days monthly.

Patients had been randomly divided into two teams. One obtained “true acupuncture.” The different group obtained extra superficial “sham” acupuncture. Both teams had 20 periods unfold over 2 months and had been adopted for six extra months.

More individuals within the true acupuncture group, vs. the sham group, confirmed enchancment of their complications: 68.2% of sufferers within the true acupuncture group had fewer month-to-month headache days, vs. 48.1% within the sham group after 16 weeks. At 6 months, the true acupuncture group continued to have fewer month-to-month complications, in comparison with the sham group (68.2% vs. 50%, respectively).

“Tension-type headaches are one of the most common types of headaches, and people who have a lot of these headaches may be looking for alternatives to medication,” research creator Ying Li, MD, PhD, of Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Chengdu, China, mentioned in a information launch.

Headaches and Women

“This was a very well-done study,” says Shi-Hong Loh, MD, an acupuncturist with places of work in Hoboken and Hackensack, NJ, however it has its limits.

Most individuals within the research had been feminine (74.5% within the true acupuncture group), and Loh feels the researchers didn’t pay sufficient consideration to the position of gender in complications and remedy response.

“In my experience, 95% of people who come to me for treatment of headaches are women,” says Loh, who’s the previous chief of hematology and oncology at St. Mary Hospital in Hoboken. While he’s nonetheless on workers at St Mary, he now has a personal follow in medical acupuncture.

“Women’s headaches are often related to stress in life and are also heavily influenced by hormonal imbalances or changes, such as those that occur during menstruation,” he notes.

The researchers’ collection of acupuncture factors was “OK, but not enough, in my opinion, since women have points in other areas,” says Loh. “If I were treating a woman with a headache, I would have used more points than they did and might treat them differently than I would treat a man.”

How Does Acupuncture Work for Headaches?

According to conventional Chinese drugs, headache is a type of stagnated chi within the physique’s vitality pathways, and acupuncture unblocks the stagnated areas, letting the chi movement freely, Loh says.

“Chi is a vital force that travels in our body through pathways called meridians,” he says. According to conventional Chinese drugs, there are 14 distinctive however linked meridians, every linked to a unique organ. A blockage leads to stagnation, which is the place sickness begins. Placing needles at varied factors alongside these meridians will launch blockages, and finally, the ache will subside.

This mechanism “cannot be understood or examined through Western medical technology, but it works, according to the Chinese medical perspective,” Loh says.

Acupuncture Works for Migraine, Too

A latest research discovered acupuncture to be useful for migraine. Researchers analyzed 15 research involving over 2,000 sufferers and located that seven out of 10 research confirmed much less frequent and fewer intense complications. Four research discovered that acupuncture was simply as efficient as Western medical approaches however had fewer uncomfortable side effects.

The researchers concluded, “Acupuncture can be recommended as an alternative or adjunct to drug treatment for patients suffering from migraines.”

Not ‘One-Size-Fits-All’

Loh says researchers within the research on acupuncture for stress complications used the identical factors for all of the individuals studied. “But according to [traditional Chinese medicine], headaches aren’t ‘one-size-fits-all.’ They have different presentations that require use of different acupuncture points.”

For instance, complications usually contain both the gallbladder or the urinary bladder meridian. If an individual’s headache is on the aspect of the top, it often includes the gallbladder meridian. So Loh then makes use of factors associated to the gallbladder. But if the headache is on the entrance or again of the top, it’s probably associated to the urinary bladder meridian.

Also, “tension headaches are often back-to-front headaches and can be related to poor posture and neck position at work, often having to do with overuse of the computer. So I advise people to pay attention to their posture at work,” he says. And stress “is a universal problem that can also cause headaches, so I also recommend stress management, not only acupuncture, as part of a treatment protocol.”

More details about how acupuncture works, the best way to discover an acupuncturist, and what to search for in an acupuncturist could be discovered on the hyperlinks under.

National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health

https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/acupuncture-in-depth

National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine

https://www.nccaom.org/find-a-practitioner-directory/

Council of Colleges of Acupuncture and Herbal Medicine

https://www.ccahm.org/ccaom/Find_a_Licensed_Practitioner.asp