While most people still prefer taking pills for their headaches as ordered per their doctor, an ever growing problem is being blamed on conventional treatments for headaches. This problem is evidenced by the increasing number of people seeking alternative therapies. One of these alternative treatments, acupuncture, has shown to be an excellent method for combating headaches, based on the results of clinical trials.

Problems with Conventional Medicines

Some conventional medications work very well for treatment of migraine headaches, with others effective in helping tension headaches. However, it has been shown, overall, they are not effective in treating a wide range of headaches. Worse, they can cause an ordinary migraine (if there is such a thing) to change into something named Chronic Daily Headache (CDH), which presents an even bigger problem because it is much more difficult to treat patients who suffer from this type of headache.

As implied by the name CDH can occur 15 times or more in a single month. The fact that a headache being treated by a headache medication can change into another type of headache can only be deemed ironic. Further increasing this dilemma is that CDH is shown to be on the rise, prompting both patients and doctors alike to seek alternative remedies.

Most headaches are triggered by factors like certain types of food or too little sleep and while precautions can be taken by a headache sufferer, it is not always feasible to do so. If these triggers cannot be avoided and medicines are not that reliable, what other method is there?

Acupuncture Therapy

Acupuncture has been used as an alternative therapy in Eastern cultures for more than 5,000 years. Acupuncture involves the practice of inserting extremely fine needles at certain points in the body. The needles are then left in place for a period ranging from just moments to several hours.

Practitioners of oriental medicine believe that the body has an energy force, called Qi (pronounced chee), which can at times become unbalanced. Placing needles in precise locations on the body where they believe energy lines are near the skin’s surface can balance the Qi, thus providing healing to the patient.

While acupuncture has been used in healing for a very long time, its effectiveness in the treatment of headaches has only recently been studied in any great depth.

Studies Prove Acupuncture Works

In a study from the UK, which was published by the prestigious British Medical Journal (BMJ), it was shown sufferers who were often absent from work because of headache pain took fewer sick days after they underwent acupuncture treatments for a period of three months. In the United States, a study conducted by the University of North Carolina provided results which showed definite improvements for CDH sufferers after acupuncture treatment.

Some Interesting Results

In Germany, two studies revealed that acupuncture helped those with migraine and tension headaches as compared to sufferers who did not receive any acupuncture at all. However, no real difference could be determined between real acupuncture and placebo acupuncture run as a control. Placebo acupuncture inserts the needles into areas without any known benefits. The leads to the conclusion that either the beneficial results are due to simple suggestion or that the placebo acupuncture inadvertently tapped into an as yet unknown function of the human body.

No matter what the results of the German studies showed, the BMJ study was sufficient to persuade the (taxpayer-financed) British National Heath Service. Many General Practitioners (GPs) within the UK have now begun to offer acupuncture as an alternative headache treatment without any harmful side effects.