Is acupuncture effective at treating headaches and migraines?
When it comes to treating headaches and migraines, large studies show that acupuncture is as effective at treating the pain as pharmaceutical drugs, and without the side effects. Effectiveness and Safety of Acupuncture for Migraine: An Overview of Systematic Reviews – PMC (nih.gov)

Effectiveness and Safety of Acupuncture for Migraine: An Overview of Sys…Migraine is a common neurological disease, which burdens individuals and society all over the world. Acupuncture…

How does acupuncture help headaches and migraines?

Acupuncture can relieve headaches and migraines in five main ways:

1. Reduces inflammation . Inflammation leads to pain, when inflammation is treated, pain is reduced or cleared altogether.
2. Mitigates pain. Beta-endorphins (natural pain-relievers made by the body in response to electrical acupuncture) are produced in response to a low hertz frequency.
3. Relieves muscle tension in head, neck and shoulders. Muscle tension is often related to stress-headaches. By relaxing muscle groups in these areas, headache pain can start to disappear.
4. Increases micro-circulation to the head, neck and shoulders. When the muscles in the head, neck and shoulders are relieved of tension through regulated blood flow, the outcome is pain relief.
5. Improves physical health and well-being. When stress modulated hormones (cortisol, dopamine, adrenaline, serotonin) are balanced, it is much easier to manage stress and less likely for stress to trigger a headache.

How are headaches and migraines diagnosed in acupuncture medicine?

At the beginning of the session you will be asked where your headache pain is felt. The areas of pain are a key aspect of treatment as they relate to excesses and deficiencies of the main channels covering the head.  These issues involve the:

1) The Stomach channel (yellow line)  – relates to frontal headaches, cheek and jaw pain

2) The Bladder channel (blue line) – relates to inner eyebrow pain and occipital headache

3) The Triple Warmer channel (purple line)- relates to temporal headache that may also involve neck, ear and shoulder tension

4) The Gall Bladder channel (green line) – covers a large portion of the sides of the head and forehead and is the most common issue with headaches

5) Liver system – relates to pain behind the eyes and/or crown of the head

What about women with migraines? 

Women may experience a pattern of migraines or headaches around or just before their menstrual cycle.  If you are a cycling woman and you don’t know your headache triggers you may want to track the timing to see if it lines up with your cycle.  If hormone shifts are part of your headache picture, your acupuncture treatment can address your hormones so that you can achieve hormone balance as well as headache relief.

Migraines in particular tend to follow a pattern of Liver / Gall Bladder Stagnation with Stomach/Spleen Qi Deficiency. The Liver and Gall Bladder system becomes “Excess” which is why there may be a visual aura (the Liver channel “opens to the eyes” and is responsible for healthy vision). The Excess of the Liver and Gall Bladder systems then overpowers (weakens) the Stomach and Spleen systems creating the common experience of nausea and in severe cases vomiting. All the endocrine glands fall directly within the Stomach and Spleen channels so this explains one way the hormones go out of balance when these channels become depleted.

How are headaches and migraines treated with acupuncture?

The strategy for treating headaches and migraines is to first assess which channel(s) are affected and treat those. The second is to use pain relieving points that cause your body to make the feel-good chemicals, the endorphins. Stimulation of endorphin-producing points will take about 24 hours to achieve their full effect as it takes this long for the body to make endorphins in response to acupuncture. The third aspect of treatment is to address nutritional deficiencies or toxins that may be causing the headaches/migraines or interfering with their healing.

What about head trauma? 

For head pain that results from physical trauma to the head after an injury, the Pointoselect tool is used to measure low electrical resistance on the skin on points related to areas of the brain (i.e. frontal lobe, occipital lobe, parietal lobe, etc.) that may have been injured.  Electrical acupuncture is then applied to those areas indicating low electrical resistance (low energy) to provide healing energy to the areas that need it the most as identified by the Pointoselect.

How will I know if the acupuncture is working?

Typically, in the case of headaches and migraines, and depending on your pattern of occurrence, you will begin to notice at first either a reduction in intensity of pain, shrinkage of areas of pain and/or reduced frequency of headaches. Usually there is some change within the first three treatments.

If you’ve had headaches or migraines for 20 years, your first change may be that left side headache pattern shifts to right side or some other change in location. This is considered a very good sign because pain that starts to move means your headache pattern is breaking up. If I can get the pain to move then it’s the beginning of getting the pain to move out of your body completely. A change in pain location is much better than pain that remains fixed in the same location all the time.

It’s also important to understand that pain is by nature competitive. This means that the nervous system which modulates pain can only signal a few areas of strong pain at any one time. So you will usually only feel one or two main areas of pain at once. Then when the initial pain area starts to heal, other areas may start to feel painful, that previously were not painful. It’s not that you suddenly have new pain but more that since other areas have resolved, you can now receive the pain signals from these other layers that are being uncovered, similar to peeling an onion.

You may notice that these other areas of pain have had issues in the past that didn’t get resolved. For example, before your headaches started, you were having hip pain. The headache pain got worse and you stopped noticing the hip pain and forgot about it. Now that the headaches are resolving, you feel your hip pain again. These older layers that got put on the back burner can now get fully resolved.

What else can I do to relieve or prevent headache or migraine pain?

1. The first step is to rule out dehydration since lack of water or fluids is an easy fix and a common cause of irregular headaches. Sometimes dehydration is not easily fixed by simply drinking more water. If you find that you are still thirsty after drinking more water and are peeing out the water more than usual, the solution may be that you need electrolytes. A simple way to add electrolytes is to use Celtic or Himalayan sea salt (try one 1/4 teaspoon added to your water) or drink coconut water. If that doesn`t solve it, you may need a more comprehensive electrolyte blend such as Re-Lyte or similar that is a mix of sodium bicarbonate, magnesium, calcium and potassium in a powder form. Mix with water for a nice-tasting drink.

2) Keep a headache diary. Consider the time when the headaches/ migraines first appeared, triggers and anything relating to their recurrence. Caffeine withdrawal from quitting or reducing intake of coffee or even tea can create severe headache for a day or so.

3) Since many headaches and migraines have a Liver/Gall Bladder channel imbalance as part of the picture, you may want to look for things in your diet/lifestyle/medications that could be causing this imbalance.

4) Rule out side-effects of your medications by looking them up on drugs.com. Lyrica has headaches listed as a common side-effect. Tylenol is hard on the liver. Relying on Tylenol for long term pain relief may be significantly contributing to headaches and migraines. There are other alternative forms of pain relief, acupuncture being a major one. Acupuncture can also be used to detox and repair liver damage from medications.

5) In terms of diet, foods that are harder on the liver/gall bladder include alcohol, plasticky “fake” fats such as margarines, or any hydrogenated oils such as hydrogenated peanut butter, denatured oils found in processed canola oil, factory processed baked goods, and deep-fried seed oils such as that found in potato or tortilla chips. Try reducing these fats and replacing them with coconut oil, extra virgin olive oil, organic butter and /or organic tallow or lard for liver-friendly fats that remain more stable at high temperatures. The liver is the body`s chemical processing plant so anything that is unnatural is unrecognizable and puts an added burden on the liver (think Splenda, aspartame, artificial flavourings, colourings, GMO foods).

If you or a loved one has been experiencing headaches or migraines without relief, now is the time to take action.

Call or text me at 647-378-3182 and we can discuss how to best help you or a loved one get relief from pain and bring things back into balance.

Warmly,

Cynthia McGilvray, R.Ac.