Acupuncture can do a tremendous job for thousands of pain sufferers.
Jack’s facial pain
Jack, a 58-year-old retired textile mechanic had been referred by his treating physician because of constant and severe facial pain. This had been present for six years prior to him coming to the pain clinic and he had been diagnosed as having trigeminal neuralgia or tic douloureux. He described the pain as being always on the left side of his face. There was never any reference to the right.
‘The pain always hits around my left eye. My eyeball swells up. I have pain from the back of my throat to my temple. It comes with a bounding pulse. I have pain in the left side of the neck and above my left eye and it extends into the left side of my head.
‘When it’s extreme I sweat over the local area of my left forehead. The pain mainly occurs when I’m asleep at night. It wakes me up. The pain builds up to a pitch where I can’t stand it. It then gradually fades away. It’s been happening every night for the last week.
‘I’ve been going to the local hospital casualty department and I’ve been seen a few times by my local doctor. He’s given me an injection. The pain is excruciating. It gets me to the screaming stage.
Six years before, he had had an alcohol injection into the trigeminal nerve. The pain returned after two months despite him being left with numbness of the entire left side of his face. Two months prior to being seen his pain had recurred. Nothing in particular had triggered it. He had first sought help from his local doctor.
One of Jack’s complications in his recent past was that he had two heart attacks within three months. He was on a lot of medication including cortisone, medication for asthma, antidepressant medication and fluid tablets for heart failure. When he came to the acupuncture clinic of a public hospital, an examination showed nothing obviously wrong. But he was a man who had obviously suffered over a long period, judging by his medical history and his heavily lined face. He looked as though he was perpetually frowning.
A diagnosis of cluster headaches (severe headaches which come in bouts, or clusters, probably caused by an allergy and usually occurring in the early hours of the morning) rather than trigeminal neuralgia was made.
Cluster headaches, unlike migraine, can be treated very effectively by the use of antidepressants, antihistamines like Dilosyn and by acupuncture. This treatment was prescribed for Jack and he commenced acupuncture treatment. The acupuncture treatment consisted mainly of needles in the left side of his face, the left hand and arm, and left leg.
Jack came back three days later. ‘It’s fantastic! I can’t believe it! I’ve had no pain since Friday!’ The acupuncture treatment was repeated. Again, he returned a week later. He had experienced a severe bout of pain the day before which lasted about half an hour. Prior to the first acupuncture treatment he was getting pain for at least four nights a week.
Within the first four weeks, he reported: ‘Look, I’ve only had a few mild attacks. None have gone to my neck as they did previously. I’ve had no sweating. But the headaches I’ve had seem to have hit me when I was under tension. The last headache occurred when my daughter had her twenty-first birthday.’
Two months after the first treatment, he came back delighted, saying: ‘I really haven’t had much in the way of headaches at all. But I’ve stopped the tablets because they made me feel nauseated.’
Jack wanted further treatment to keep up the good work. He continued treatment on a fortnightly basis for the next three months. With virtually no severe headaches at all, he was now off all medication and then stopped having acupuncture.
(A word of caution here. There is no guarantee that the headaches will not return. But if an accurate diagnosis is made, and the treatment is correct, there should be no reason at all why Jack should not be helped again with simple measures like taking tablets or having acupuncture.)
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