People who suffer from regular migraines know what it feels like to be in pain.
Many people just look for any over-the-counter medication to help take the edge off. Others go to a neurologist for consultation and advice and prescription pills. Surely, though, there must be a more natural, holistic way to treat migraines? There is–acupuncture has been found to successfully treat migraine pain, and is an affordable and drug-free alternative to medicines and other potential treatment plans.
With more and more doctors and patients looking for alternative, drug-free solutions to migraine pain, acupuncture has become a popular alternative. A migraine can be debilitating and can go on for days. Many regular migraine sufferers have to deal with intense, throbbing headaches that can keep them in bed for days at a time, and quite often, their go-to solution provide little if any relief. Acupuncture treatments for migraine relief and prevention has become more mainstream, gaining support with the American Headache Society and the medical community.
Surprisingly for patients in the Western world, acupuncture has been used to treat migraines for thousands of years. While there are understandable risks and side effects associated with medication and traditional treatments, acupuncture has no associated side effects at all, which gives patients a sense of hope that, if nothing else, their headaches will not worsen or intensify. Even better, many migraine patients express a sense of relief after receiving acupuncture treatment, and many more say that continual acupuncture sessions have lessened the intensity and frequency of these intense, painful headaches.
The treatment of migraine headache with acupuncture is not what you would expect. Sure, there are still needles. However, rather than gently inserting needles into areas of the head, as usual for pain relief in acupuncture therapy, increasing blood flow directly to the head and neck can actually make a migraine worse due to increased circulation. In this regard, acupuncture therapists have come up with a new, innovative option. In the treatment of severe headaches like migraines, acupuncturists focus instead on increasing circulation in the lower body, effectively minimizing the risk of increased dilation of the blood vessels in the head known to make a migraine treatment worse.
While acupuncture for treatment of a migraine currently happening is still being experimented with, acupuncture can be a positive solution to trying to prevent migraines from happening as severely or frequently. Regular acupuncture treatments can decrease overall stress and muscle tension, which can keep migraines at bay. Increasing circulation overall regularly can be an essential aid in keeping migraines away more and more often, giving much-needed relief to people who know the amount of pain a migraine can cause.