Chinese Medicine for Headaches & Migraine
Headaches are often related to stress or can occur along-side fatigue, muscular pains or insomnia and migraines are often accompanied by nausea, dizziness and aversion to bright lights. In all of these cases, Chinese Medicine can be used to treat the root cause of the problem as well as dealing with the manifestation.
In many cases tight muscles in the neck and shoulders can contribute to or even cause headaches or migraine, and Tui Na massage is especially useful to relax the muscles and often has dramatic effects. If you have held tension in these muscles for some time you may not even realise that they are the cause of the problem.
Diet can be an important factor, particularly with migraine – in some sufferers a specific food can trigger a migraine attack (often shellfish, red wine or chocolate for instance.) Even if there is not a direct trigger such as this it is often possible to control attacks by relatively simple changes to the diet, a Chinese nutritional analysis will reveal if there are changes that you could make in this area.
There are a number of causes of headaches and migraine, and Chinese medicine distinguishes many different types, depending on the nature and location of the pain, and other symptoms. The treatment is based on the Chinese diagnosis, and results are generally excellent.
The acupuncture treatment of headaches and migraines has been extensively researched, and a systematic review of the evidence by the Cochrane collaboration concluded that for migraine acupuncture treatment is at least as effective, or possible more effective than treatment with drugs, but without the side effects. They also found that treatment by acupuncture was effective for chronic tension-type headaches.
