Headaches, Chiropractic & Acupuncture

If you suffer from migraine headaches, you know that they're not "just headaches".  Migraines can be so painful as to be debilitating, and may include secondary symptoms such as nausea, sensitivity to light and noise, and extreme lethargy.  They affect more than 37 million people in the United States.  Unfortunately, they’re often difficult to treat and conventional approaches—principally medication—frequently don’t provide the relief patients need.  The same drugs that work to alleviate pain or prevent occurrences that work for one patient fail miserably with another patient, and the drugs themselves often cause adverse reactions.

Rachel, a 32-year-old patient at our office had experienced a combination of all of these treatment failures.  She had experienced episodic migraines since her teens, and they had for a time been partially controlled by medications.  But then she had to stop taking the medications because they had caused severe gastrointestinal symptoms.  Afterwards, her headaches occurred daily for five months, and were diagnosed by a neurologist as chronic tension-type headache (CTTH) with superimposed migraine.

When she came to our office, I’m not sure she had much hope left.  But after an examination, it was suggested that she try a combination of acupuncture and chiropractic adjustments.  She was experiencing a migraine during her first visit at our office.  The headache went away, and did not return for two hours.  The second week of care, she also had two acupuncture appointments, and she noted that by the end of the second week, the care had resulted in a 90% reduction in pain in the headache area.  Subsequent treatments over a two-week period combined acupuncture with spinal adjustments.  After the fifth treatment, the patient reported that the headache was gone.

There’s a preconceived notion that chiropractic treatment has to go on and on and on.  This isn’t always true.  For Rachel, she was doing so much better by that fifth appointment that we began to extend the time between future visits.

Follow-up treatments were scheduled over an 11-week period to monitor the headaches and some diet concerns lingering from the gastrointestinal problems she had experienced from her prior use of the migraine medications, but the migraines did not reappear.  At the time of her last treatment, she was evaluated to be headache-free, and her gastrointestinal problems had been resolved.  It’s been several months now, and Rachel still hasn’t had any headaches.

This is one example that supports other clinical and population-based studies that suggest that acupuncture should be considered as a first-line therapy for migraines, and that the effectiveness of the acupuncture is further enhanced by chiropractic spinal adjustments. Naturally, the fact that the case study represents only a single patient means that the results of these treatments may not be generalizable to the broader population of migraine sufferers.  But anecdotal evidence from numerous other patients who were treated similarly suggests that this combination of treatments may be effective in reducing the frequency and severity of migraine pain.

So if you suffer from migraine headaches, we encourage you to contact our office to learn more about this combination of acupuncture and spinal adjustments.  It’s important to understand that there are natural alternatives to drug-based therapies available for migraine sufferers, and that these treatment options can provide lasting relief for many patients who are not helped by medications.   Between exercise, nutrition, and addressing your nervous system through therapy such as chiropractic or acupuncture, you can reduce or eliminate your headaches!