HEADACHE & MIGRAINE ACUPUNCTURE IN BONDI JUNCTION SYDNEY

For those who experience headaches with any frequency, you know that it’s not just a sore head, it can affect your mood, energy, ability to concentrate, make you more irritable and even impact your relationships. Not to mention if you suffer from migraines, you may also have visual disturbances, photosensitivity, nausea, vomiting and/or vertigo thrown in the mix.

 

Pain is only meant to be our body’s signal that something needs attention, but that isn’t always easy to identify and so that signal can create a vicious cycle. A repeated pain signal will negatively affect blood flow, cause contraction and guarding (particularly of the neck with headaches), drain our energy, heighten our sympathetic fight or flight response, increase inflammation, and make us more irritable and anxious. All of this creates an internal environment that is ideal for more headaches.

 

Pain relief medications can be useful to help reduce the intensity of headaches and migraines, but when you experience these often, you quickly realise that this is just a band aid fix. For some, the medication doesn’t even help at all. Most people would love to find something that not only helped relieve a current headache or migraine, but also reduced the frequency and severity of future headaches (or even better, got rid of them all together).

 

How do we use acupuncture for headaches and migraines?

 

You were not meant to have constant headaches or frequent migraines. From a Chinese medicine perspective, these are symptoms of an imbalance somewhere in your body that has caused your normal healthy circulation to have become impaired. An acupuncturist’s job is to figure out that imbalance and help restore your internal environment to a point where headaches are no longer produced, or when they are, they’re less intense and less frequent.

 

For headaches and migraines, the neck and upper back are key areas to be assessed. Often there are certain muscles that contribute to the headache pain. These can be identified through palpation as they will recreate the pain upon pressure. We must also look at treating you as a whole person, rather than just a sore head and tight neck. Stress is going to play a role in chronic headaches and migraines. Good quality sleep is crucial. Digestion and diet can also be a factor that we need to look at. There are many factors we may need to consider and address. Your acupuncturist’s job is to help you navigate all of that too.

 

At Acupuncture Grove in Bondi Junction Sydney, we use acupuncture for headaches and migraines tailored specifically to you. Typically if it’s going to be helpful for you, we will know very early on within the first 4-6 treatments (often earlier). That doesn’t mean that you will be completely free of headaches in that time, usually chronic conditions will take some time to unravel and may need ongoing maintenance, but you should feel some early signs of relief or improvement from the acupuncture if it’s going to help. Once we know how you’re responding to the acupuncture, we’ll then work out a treatment plan for you. The ultimate goal would be to get you to a place where you don’t need acupuncture anymore, or it’s just something you do for maintenance.

 

Chinese herbal medicine may also be a useful adjunct when working with headaches and migraines. It’s the same idea as acupuncture, we use it for a period to help address certain imbalances, but as you improve, we aim to get to a point where it’s no longer necessary. If it’s something that we feel will help you along, we’ll discuss it as part of the treatment plan. 

 

If you would like to try acupuncture for headaches or migraines with Acupuncture Grove in Sydney’s Bondi Junction, please book online here or contact us with any questions.