09/06/2024
According to Old medicine and reflexology, pressing on specific spots on the back of the neck, face, shoulders, and hands may help you relieve headaches.
Experiencing the pain and discomfort of a headache is incredibly common. If you’re looking for a more natural way to treat your headache, you may want to think about acupressure and pressure points.
What are pressure points?
Pressure points are parts of the body believed to be extra sensitive, able to stimulate relief in the body. Practitioners of reflexology, a discipline of Chinese medicine, believe that touching pressure points in a certain way can:
improve your health
ease pain
restore balance in the body
What is reflexology?
Reflexology is the study of how one part of the human body is connected to another. This means you might have to massage a different location — such as your hand — to treat a different area, such as your head. You’ll reach for the right pressure points to ease your pain.
If you want to learn more about treating your headache this way, it’s important to understand how to do so correctly. We explain what science says and give you some pressure points to try next time your head hurts.
The science behind pressure points and headaches
There’s not too much science that supports the use of reflexology to treat headaches, and the studies we have are small and need to be expanded.
However, there are a few studies that have looked into how massage therapy on the head and shoulders can relieve headaches. This sometimes involves stimulating pressure points on the head.
In one small study from 2002Trusted Source, scientists investigated how massage might help four adults who were experiencing chronic tension headaches, defined as experiencing tension headaches two to three times per week for 6 months.
In the study, the massages lowered the number of headaches in each study participant within the first week of treatment. By the end of the treatment period, the average number of headaches each study participant experienced fell from almost seven headaches per week to just two per week. The average length of a study participant’s headache also decreased by half during the treatment period from an average of 8 hours to an average of 4.
In a much older but slightly larger study from 1990, scientists looked at how 10 intense 1-hour massage treatments spread over 2 weeks might affect 21 women experiencing chronic headaches. As in the smaller study, participants in this study received massages from certified massage practitioners. The effects of the massages were then studied on a more long-term time frame.
Researchers in this study found that those 10 intense massage sessions led to a lowered occurrence, duration, and intensity of headaches.
Do you have migraine attacks too? There have also been studies on stimulating pressure points for migraine relief.
