One thinks of the pain a Headache causes and for its relief, medication, such as aspirin or metaxalon, ends up being prescribed by a doctor or a nurse. Yet you may be surprised with the results stemming from alternative therapies to deal with headaches and to find out they are not only easy to undergo but sometimes less expensive than ongoing medication. Our article is going to present Acupuncture – a centuries – old Chinese therapy used extensively in the East – and more recently in the western world, where many people suffering from headache have been converted to using it based on its effectiveness and how well it deals with their headache pains.
Can Acupuncture Help With Chronic Headaches?
If you, or someone close to you, suffers from chronic headaches you know just how difficult it is to deal with everyday pain. Handling the problem is not at all easy when the pain impairs your everyday life style. Short-term effectiveness may be achieved by using common analgesics in dealing with the problem. But more often than not, your body will build up resistance to such medications coming back with a vengeance through a more painful headache unresponsive to medication. Due to this decrease in effectiveness, many people suffering from chronic headache problems have trusted acupuncture as a natural alternative therapy.
Fear of needles may strike a sensitive chord in many of us bringing up less than pleasant images. To ease many different medical problems, headaches included, fine needles are inserted into the skin at specific points in the body (called acupoints). For several years, in-depth research into the use of Acupuncture Treatment revealed that it might give medication a run for its money when it comes to treating headaches. A Swiss study on treating two most common types of headaches involved using acupuncture therapies. The published study results showed that acupuncture was an effective therapy for such headaches rivaling well-known and established pain relief medications.
What to Expect?
Acupuncture advocates say that the treatment exceeds the results you get of using medication when it comes to treating headaches. In their argument acupuncture treatment causes no side effects for the body, while usually there is an extent of side effects associated with headache pain relief drugs. Yet without a throughout study to support benefits claims, one should always be careful. The study we mentioned in the previous paragraph shows that there are benefits in the use of acupuncture treatment yet that is only one study. More studies need to be published on the use of acupuncture for relief of headache before definitive and accurate results can be considered regarding how effective the treatment is. As most acupuncture treatment detractors argue, it is possible for a placebo effect to be the cause of positive results.
The gateway theory should also be contemplated when one considers acupuncture. The theory says the body may only experience just a number of sensations at any given time. Once the body reaches sensory overload, it will begin ignoring some of the sensations. You can easily put the theory to test with the well-known effect of injury rubbing and feeling the natural reaction. Imagine for a moment you have just been stung by a bee. By rubbing the insect bite, the pain seems to go away; although you have not applied any medicines to it. This is the gateway theory working its magic and acupuncture therapy may work just like this. In the acupuncture treatment your body could be rejecting the signals of pain from the constant headache and focus instead on the pain caused by the needles.
One should definitely look for serious research results before engaging in any treatment. This article is a mere introduction to the possibilities brought forward by the acupuncture therapy, and a stepping stone on your continued efforts for researching the best approach for your individual treatment.
The post Acupuncture for Headache Relief appeared first on Acupuncture.
