Headaches

A recent review (Nov 2009) of 33 separate medical studies involving nearly 7,000 patients looked at the benefits of acupuncture in the treatment of headaches and migraines.

The researchers found that volunteers who were treated with traditional Chinese acupuncture, had fewer headaches and migraines. They also found that volunteers treated with acupuncture experienced less pain if a headache developed. After eight weeks of treatment, patients who had acupuncture and no painkillers had fewer headaches compared with those who were given only painkillers.

Dr Mike Cummings, medical director of the British Medical Acupuncture Society, has stated,"This review confirms that acupuncture is as good for headaches as the best available conventional treatments, if not better." You can read more about this report by following this link.

There are many different types of headache in Chinese medicine and they all require different treatment approaches. If you look at the illustration you will see that different areas of the head are labelled with different names. These relate to the different acupuncture channels. For example, migraine type headaches are often one sided, around the temporal region and affect one eye. This area of the head relates to the Liver and Gall Bladder channels and treatment will be aimed at regulating the energy in these channels and rectifying the imbalance.

Frontal headaches are associated with the Large Intestine and Stomach channels ( 'Yang Ming' within the diagram). These headaches are often associated with imbalances in the digestive system. Recently I treated a 19 male patient who had suffered from headaches since he was 13 years old. On questioning he grew up on a farm and drink a lot of milk. In this case his body had difficulty digesting the milk, which lead to the production and accumulation of Damp (mucus) which then obstructed the movement of energy in the Stomach and large Intestine channels (across the forehead). Dietary changes and a few sessions of acupuncture soon got rid of his headaches.