If you listen to advocates for alternative medical techniques, treatments like acupuncture, acupressure, and especially yoga and meditation are all very effective treatments that just aren’t being given a chance by Western medicine. If tested, they say, these treatments could show themselves to be highly effective, but big drug companies are eager to suppress drug-free treatments.
There is some truth to this. After all, there are many in the medical community that don’t accept the effectiveness of neuromuscular dentistry, but we know it for a fact–we’ve seen it and accomplished it. But other times, treatments just don’t live up to the promises when given the chance, such as when meditation met migraines.
Testing the Effectiveness of Meditation
Researchers at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, attempted to confirm the effectiveness of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), a type of yoga and meditation, as a migraine treatment. With the strong role of stress as a migraine trigger, this type of meditation seems an ideal choice to test.
In this small pilot study, the nineteen patients were divided evenly between MBSR (10) and usual care (9). Both sets of patients saw migraine reduction. And, in fact MBSR led to slightly more reduction in the number of migraines, the pain level of migraines, and even the length of migraines. Unfortunately, none of these effects occurred to such a degree that they could be considered statistically significant. In other words, the study doesn’t really give evidence that meditation is better than conventional care.
Researchers played up the positive effects such as the fact that MBSR didn’t have any adverse effects (of course). And it should be noted that this was a little bit harder of a test for MBSR than many drugs go through. MBSR wasn’t being tested against a placebo–it was being run against an actual treatment, which it was basically comparable with. The lack of statistical significance may also be because the sample size was too small, something that will be corrected in future studies.
Effective Migraine Relief Today
The good news is that there is an effective, alternative to drugs for migraines, we may be able to help. TMJ treatment has been proven effective at reducing headaches, including migraines.
To learn whether TMJ treatment might be effective on your migraines, please call (803) 781-9090 for an appointment with a Columbia, SC TMJ dentist at Smile Columbia Dentistry.
