Imagine wearing a helmet that’s too tight for your head. Ouch, right?
That’s how tension-type headaches feel. They press or squeeze both sides of your head and can last for many days in a month.
They aren’t made worse by playing football or running, and they don’t make you feel sick in the stomach like some headaches do. When they happen more than half the days in a month, doctors call them ‘chronic’.
How Can We Treat These Headaches?
Dr. Ying Li, a scientist and doctor from Chengdu University in China, said that many people who often have these headaches might want to try something different to pills to stop the pain. That’s where acupuncture comes in.
What is Acupuncture?
Acupuncture is a kind of treatment where very thin needles are put into your skin at certain points. It’s not as scary as it sounds! There are two types of acupuncture.
In ‘true acupuncture’, the needles are moved around until you feel a special kind of feeling called ‘deqi’.
It might feel like a tingle, numbness, or a heavy feeling. In ‘superficial acupuncture’, the needles aren’t pushed in as deep and don’t cause the deqi feeling.
Dr. Li’s Study on Acupuncture and Headaches
Dr. Li and her team studied 218 people who had chronic tension-type headaches. On average, these people had been having headaches for 11 years and suffered headaches 22 days per month.
These people were randomly split into two groups. One group received true acupuncture and the other group got superficial acupuncture.
Both groups had two or three acupuncture sessions each week for two months. After that, they were checked on for another six months.
How Did They Measure the Results?
Dr. Li’s team wanted to see if acupuncture could reduce the number of days with headaches by at least half. The people in the study had check-ups every four weeks and wrote in diaries about their headaches and any medicines they took.
What Were the Results?
At the end of the study, more than half of the people in both groups reported fewer days of headaches.
But the group that got true acupuncture had better results! About 68% of them said they had at least half fewer days with headaches each month, compared to 50% in the superficial acupuncture group.
For the true acupuncture group, the number of headache days went down from 20 days per month to just 7.
For the superficial acupuncture group, headache days decreased from 23 days per month to 12 days. And the best part? The only side effects were mild and didn’t need any extra treatment!
What Does This Mean for Us?
Dr. Li said that while this study shows that acupuncture can help reduce headaches, more research is needed to see how effective it is in the long term.
It’s also important to compare how well it works with other treatments. And, of course, how much it costs is also a factor.
A limitation of this study is that it was only done in one hospital, so the results might not be the same for everyone. But it gives us hope that there are other ways to manage chronic headaches!
If you care about pain, please read studies about vitamin K deficiency linked to hip fractures in old people, and these vitamins could help reduce bone fracture risk.
For more information about wellness, please see recent studies that Krill oil could improve muscle health in older people, and eating yogurt linked to lower frailty in older people.
The study was published in Neurology.
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