3 Ways Acupuncture Can Help for Migraines

Can acupuncture really help with migraine headaches? I mean how is it possible that some of the strongest pharmaceuticals can provide even marginal relief sometimes? And how is it that putting in a needle the size of a human hair would really do anything for serious migraines? Well in this video I want to share a couple pieces of research and the outcomes they found based on a meta-analysis so a series of research that's been compiled into one and then analyzed and take a look at what some of the outcomes have been regarding migraine headaches. Hey it's Alex Hine author of the health book Master the Day and I've included the first link below is for a free PDF download. 5 daily rituals that can possibly help you add 10 years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. So you can check it out right there down below the video. So let's take a look at some of this research here really quick. Now some of the research analyzed by the Cochrane collaboration found that acupuncture was associated with a moderate reduction of headache frequency over no acupuncture so over no treatment. The no treatment group saw headache frequency go down by at least 50% in 17% of people that did no treatment. But in the acupuncture group it was almost triple that at 41% saw their headaches go down at least half or more. Now in another series of studies there were 12 trials analyzed with 1646 participants and a follow-up of 1534 participants and they found that acupuncture was associated with a small but statistically significant frequency over sham which we'll talk about in just a sec. After treatment the headache frequency also went down by again 41% of the people and 50% specifically in the true acupuncture group and in the follow-up 53% had still had a reduced frequency of these migraine headaches. Now here's a third study on acupuncture versus a conventional pharmacological treatment with a pharmaceutical drug. Now in this study acupuncture reduced the migraine frequency significantly more than drug prophylaxis after treatment after three months the headache frequency went down at least 50% in 57% of the people receiving acupuncture versus 46% receiving prophylactic drugs and then after six months in 59% of people in the acupuncture group and 54% in the drug group. Now what's interesting too is that these participants in the acupuncture group are less likely to drop out due to adverse effects and even report side effects versus the prophylactic drug group. Now here's a final study coming out of Germany seeing how many days the frequency of headaches were reduced. So let's say you had five days of headaches this month how many days could that be reduced to? So in this study between a baseline study in weeks 9 to 12 the number of days with a headache of moderate or severe intensity decreased by 2.7 from an average of 5.2 in the acupuncture group compared to the sham group compared to the waiting list group. So the waiting list group only went down by literally 0.8 days versus the original of 2.2. Now what's interesting that in this group they found no difference between the acupuncture and the sham acupuncture group which is really interesting and we should talk about that right now. So because in a double-blind study you need to have some kind of sham or a control and then an experimental group but how do you test that with acupuncture when you're literally putting a needle into somebody's skin? How could you possibly come up with a fake version of that? Now unfortunately I can't access these papers so I can't see what the sham was used but the problem is in many of these studies the sham used is for example acupuncture on the same channel but off the recommended points. So not the proper points for a migraine headache. The other sham often used is either putting in the needle very superficially or just on the surface of the skin or being off the channel and in some point that's not considered an acupuncture point. So what's fascinating is that in one of these studies the true acupuncture was only a little bit more efficacious than the sham. Again I don't know what it is, sorry I'll try to find out later and post it below but here's what's really interesting. Unfortunately conventional researchers assume this to be an effective sham but there's a couple things that come up and a couple problems. The first is that there's an entire sect, a faction of Chinese medicine in Japan that uses non-insertive acupuncture. They literally will put the needle on the surface of the skin and tap it there or twirl it gently on the acupuncture point to stimulate it or it's so gentle that it just goes into the first superficial layer of two to three millimeters of the skin. So that's a big problem in trying to study acupuncture with the sham. The second is this idea of on the channel but not the right point or off the channel. Why is that sometimes working as effective as the true acupuncture in one of these studies? To me being off the point means very little because in a lot of traditional lineages, again Japanese meridian therapy, Wang Juyi, a physician who lived in Beijing has a whole book, a textbook called Applied Channel Theory where he emphasizes just stimulating the channel not the points. To me if the channels really are, whether it is something physiological or it's bioelectricity, if the goal is to wake up the whole channel so to speak, the circulation in the whole channel, then the point itself is a lot less important than choosing the right channel and there are a lot of physicians whose primary goal is to find the right channel and have that treatment approach. But what about being off the channel? How would that actually reduce the myorin headache? Does that mean acupuncture is BS? Ultimately I don't know but what I can say is that it's interesting that people believe that if it's off the acupuncture point there is no acupuncture point there that it somehow devalues acupuncture. To me saying that there's no acupuncture point there is like saying there's no blood circulation there. If acupuncture is strongly tied to the activity of circulation and if a lot of what it does increases circulation then there's pretty much no point in your body that circulation isn't accessed. So saying that putting a point, using a needle off the point, off the channel in some ridiculous spot, how could that prove that acupuncture is not a placebo? To me all it proves is that the body is a unified system and that acupuncture on some level has a global effect. Maybe the global effect of acupuncture is purely that it helps the body get into parasympathetic mode and that there's some kind of global relaxation of the nervous system regardless of where you place a needle. I could see that happening but again this is just conjecture, some thoughts on my end and some opinions. But either way some interesting research coming out of Cochrane Collaboration which usually looks at meta-analyses of all these randomized control trials. So just some interesting food for thought as well as what all these shams are that are being used for acupuncture. So I hope now maybe if you've been experiencing migraine headaches, specifically the study comparing acupuncture and the sham versus conventional pharmacological therapy, I thought that was pretty interesting. Especially a lot of people do take some pretty heavy-hitting drugs because their migraines can induce vomiting or light sensitivity or they need to be in their room for two days. So it's an option you want to consider, maybe not, but that's up for you to judge. Again the first link in the description is for a free PDF download, 5 Daily Rituals That Can Possibly Help You Add 10 Years To Your Life With Traditional Chinese Medicine. So you can check it out down there below and then check out my related video on this exact topic right over here.