Looking for Headache Relief? Combining Chiropractic Care with Acupuncture May Help!

If you suffer from migraine headaches (Headache Relief), 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.

The 32-year-old patient in a 2012 case study published in the Journal of Chiropractic Medicine 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.

She finally went to a Doctor of Chiropractic, who examined her and prescribed a combination of acupuncture and chiropractic manipulation. She was experiencing a migraine during her first visit, which involved acupuncture treatment only. The headache went away, and did not return for two hours. The second treatment was also acupuncture only, and resulted in a 90% reduction in pain in the headache area for the rest of the day. Subsequent treatments over a two-week period combined acupuncture with spinal manipulation. After the fifth treatment, the patient reported that the headache was gone.

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. When the patient was contacted one year later, she reported no instances of headaches since the last treatment. She happily gave permission for her case to be published in the case study.

This case study 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 manipulation. 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 your chiropractor to learn more about this combination of acupuncture and spinal manipulation. 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.