Review of a series of case reports on the Effect of Hand Acupuncture with a Focus on 29 Patients with Headaches

(10) Journal of Pharmacopuncture, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 91∼97, 2011

Review of a series of case reports on the Effect of Hand Acupuncture with a Focus on 29 Patients with Headaches

Seung-Ho Sun

Abstract

Objectives: Twenty-nine (29) case reports were reviewed to determine the possibility of using hand acupuncture as an effective treatment for headaches.

Methods: After approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB), the medical records of 29 outpatients with headaches, who had visited the Oriental Medical Hospital from December 2008 to December 2010, who had undergone hand acupuncture treatment without other intervention, and who had been diagnosed with one disease listed in the international Classification of Headache Disease, second version (ICHD-2) were analyzed. The data were analyzed using the Wilcoxon signed rank test to determine whether hand acupuncture treatment affected the difference between the before-and the after-treatment Visual Analogue Scales (VASs) for various types of headaches and syndrome differentiation. The statistics program SPSS 18.0 was used. Differences were considered significant at P < 0.05.

Results: The VAS of patients with headaches was reduced after treatment with hand acupuncture from 6.57 ± 2.04 to 2.90 ± 2.04 for overall headaches, from 6.32 ± 2.05 to 2.47 ± 2.03 for tension-type headaches (P < 0.001), from 7.10 ± 2.18 to 3.70 ± 1.77 for migraines (P < 0.001), and from 6.00 ± 1.41 to 2.50 ± 3.54 for unspecified headaches. Hand acupuncture produced a decrease in VAS for both ascendant hyperactivity of liver yang (P < 0.001) and phlegm turbidity according to syndrome differentiation (P = 0.002). No adverse events were encountered in any of the patients.

Conclusions: We suggest that hand acupuncture may be effective in relieving headache, and may applicable as the first choice for acupuncture treatment of headaches.

Key Words: headache; hand acupuncture; tension-type headache; probable migraine