Do you suffer from headaches? If you do, you're not alone.
The New York Times reported that 73% of Americans suffer from headaches.
If headaches are a part of your life, you know well that Western medicine has no cure for your condition.
If you're lucky, you've found a medicine that resolves the pain temporarily, without too many side effects.
If you're not lucky, there are no medications to help with the pain.
You may not believe this, but a vast majority of people suffering from headaches can be cured with acupuncture.
No matter if you've been getting headaches for the past twenty months or for the last twenty years, acupuncture can break the cycle of pain permanently.
How is that possible? Acupuncture treats both the headache and the source of the headache.
Chinese medicine goes to the root of the problem, which is the imbalance that generates headaches in the first place.
You might say, "Well, it's all the stress I'm under that's responsible for my headaches".
You are partially correct.
Stress plays a major role in many headaches, but if you didn't also have internal imbalances, stress would not trigger a headache in you.
For example, one could say that the wind is responsible for knocking down trees during severe storms.
But often it is the sick or rigid trees that get knocked down, while the healthy, more flexible trees withstand storms much better.
While the wind plays its part, the health of the trees is critically important to whether it will survive a storm.
It's the same with people and disease.
Stress, like the wind, would not trigger headaches and other health problems if the person's underlying health was stronger.
Acupuncture treats the patient to make them function more like the healthy and flexible trees.
How does acupuncture improve your health? On a certain level it's hard to imagine how putting a tiny needle in a certain location on the body can improve one's health.
When you turn on a light switch, a circuit is open, electricity flows, and a light turns on.
Acupuncture points on the surface of the body act in a similar way to influence organ function in the body.
The Chinese discovered that activating specific points, a majority of which are located on the arms and legs, sends messages to specific organs.
And, like a dimmer switch, manipulating the needles certain ways at these locations can influence the type of message that is sent.
But how do you know what message to send, and what organ to treat for any given disease or symptom? That's another insight of Chinese medicine.
Each imbalance responsible for disease can be corrected with a certain acupuncture point combination.
Regarding headaches, there are 20 different imbalances responsible for triggering different types of headaches.
There are headaches with sharp stabbing pain to the temples, dull achy pain in the back of the head, mild persistent daily headaches, and excruciating migraines with auras and light sensitivity, to name just a few.
A Chinese medicine doctor must first determine which imbalance is responsible for your particular headache, then create a point prescription most appropriate to correct the imbalance, and then apply the needles with skill and precision to properly influence the organs to get the desired results.
How long do the benefits last? Remarkably, once corrected with acupuncture, the benefits last a very long time.
Some people never need to come back for treatment.
Others come for tune-ups when they feel the need.
For the most part, the body holds onto the changes, adopting them as the new normal.
This makes sense because the body started out healthy before it fell out of balance, triggering the disease or symptoms.
Acupuncture is simply putting the body back into balance.
Once there, it tends to stay in balance.