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Dr. M. Muthukumar

Where most therapies have failed to turn up a cure for migraine, acupuncture promises relief from that excruciating pain, as well as a cure.

Migraine is one of the most debilitating diseases one may encounter in one's life. And Aetiology, the science that deals with the causes or origins of disease, prescribes that anything, may cause migraine and definitive cure for this malady is unknown. The usual analgesics or pain killers play little role in migraine therapy. This results in excessive intake of analgesics by the patient, leading to Hepatitic Toxicity. Allopathy offers no known definitive medical solution for this terrible disease.

Migraine affects people of all age groups, but mostly those over 12 years of age. It is not gender specific and both men and women are equally susceptible to the condition. The acute headaches usually begin the moment a person wakes up from sleep. Most people experience excruciating, throbbing pain followed by vomiting, after which the patient may feel little better.

I have come across cases of patients suffering from such throbbing headaches continuously for up to three to four days. The source of the pain is not confined to one particular area of the scalp. It often keeps changing and the headaches are always one sided. In most of the cases, migraine is accompanied by visual disturbances too.

In Acupuncture, about 4,000 years ago, the founders have identified the defects that lead to migraine. The ancient practitioners clearly divided the scalp into different areas — frontal, parietal, vertex, temporal or occipital areas. Each area is concerned with a particular meridian. So, when a patient complains of pain in a particular region, the acupuncturist immediately knows the exact meridian or meridians that are the cause of the pain. He again confirm the diagnosis by examining the Iris.

Depending on the meridians — stomach, large intestine, liver, gall bladder, heart, and so on — the patient experiences pain on the area involved. For instance, if the stomach meridian is involved, the pain is always associated with vomiting or nausea because digestion is disturbed. Allopathy lays down that vomiting is due to hyper-acidity, but it doesn't correlate the frontal headache to the stomach problem.

Likewise, the liver meridian, when affected, will cause a headache associated with pain in the eye. The reason offered in acupuncture is that the liver meridian ends in the eyes. So, continuous intake of analgesic that eventually leads to liver toxicity, will aggravate the pain as the liver meridian gets damaged. When liver meridian is disturbed, the patient naturally has visual disturbances.

So, any pain over the vertex and temporal areas will also lead to visual disturbances as the liver meridian is manifested in vertex and temporal areas.

In acupuncture, after examining the patient's iris and identifying the meridian involved together with the blockage in the area, the task of the acupuncturist becomes easy. He then proceeds to bring equilibrium in that meridian by releasing the blockage and this brings relief to the patient. As there are no drugs used in acupuncture and the patient's body is prepared to fight the problem, recurrence of the migraine can be avoided.

Chornicity is never a problem in acupuncture; just as a drain may remain clogged for days on end, but once flushed, continues to remain clean, the same happens in this case.

The treatment schedule in acupuncture begins with the patient being pricked with fine needles for a duration of 30 minutes for 15 days. Then a break of two to eight days is recommended after which begins another 15-day session. Each schedule of 15 days is called one `course'. A minimum of two to four `courses' are required depending on the severity of the case. The advantage of acupuncture is that it has no side effects; it is a relatively painless procedure and the diagnosis is made by a simple examination of the Iris. Further, diagnosis involves no expensive procedure or extended time schedules.

There is no intake of drugs or application of external ointments. Separate needles are used for all patients, and the patient is given the set of needles to be taken home and sterilised. This is a sure fire way of avoiding the risk of getting infected with a disease another patient might have.

The author is an acupuncturist at Laser Acupuncture Unit, Vijaya Health Centre, Chennai.

Picture by Bijoy Ghosh

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