Acupuncture as an effective treatment for headache

In a recent report, the BMA (British Medical Association) recognised that acupuncture was an effective treatment for headaches. I commonly treat headaches in the clinic and usually get a lot of success.

Headaches DiagramThere are many different types of headache in Chinese medicine and they all require different treatment approaches. If you look at the illustration you will see that different areas of the head are labelled with different names. These relate to the different acupuncture channels. For example, migraine type headaches are often one sided, around the temporal region and affect one eye. This area of the head relates to the Liver and Gall Bladder channels and treatment will be aimed at regulating the energy in these channels and rectifying the imbalance.

Frontal headaches are associated with the Large Intestine and Stomach channels ( 'Yang Ming' within the diagram). These headaches are often associated with imbalances in the digestive system. Recently I treated a 19 male patient who had suffered from headaches since he was 13 years old. On questioning he grew up on a farm and drink a lot of milk. In this case his body had difficulty digesting the milk, which lead to the production and accumulation of Damp (mucus) which then obstructed the movement of energy in the Stomach and large Intestine channels (across the forehead). Dietary changes and a few sessions of acupuncture soon got rid of his headaches.