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What is the success rate of acupuncture?

I am a 28 year old male. I have headaches and I heard about acupuncture. What is the success rate of acupuncture?

21 Answers

I have heard that western medicine is effective 33% of the time and that eastern medicine 75% of the time. My success rate seems to be far higher than that, probably 98%. It's awesome for most problems, especially those western medicine can't really affect.
If the reason for the headaches is accurately diagnosed, according to Eastern Medicine, the success rate should be good.
Oriental medicine is a medicine to treat the cause. Therefore, if the exact cause is caught, the treatment rate is almost 80% to 90%.
You need to see your family doctor first and ask him (her) to refer you to see the professional licensed acupuncture and the success rate is high.
99%
There are many studies out and available on the internet regarding acupuncture and its effects on headaches. The first one I saw said that 59% of patients had a 50% reduction of headache- I don't know if that was referring to headache occurrence or headache pain. But, there is lots of info out there and acupuncture is always worth a try.
In my clinic? I have only had one patient who came to me for headaches that did not eventually leave with no headaches. That patient needed massive chiropractic work and i referred her out. My job is to help you find what you need, even if it is not what I do, so i still count this a successful outcome as the patient got better with the help of adjustments.
Absolutely, you can treat headaches with acupuncture.
Good question. It depends on various factors, particularly the skill of the provider with accurate diagnosis. Acupuncture is a branch of traditional medicine with its roots in Asia. The power of traditional medicine is the diagnosis system that looks at many symptoms to synthesize an accurate diagnosis. With headaches for instance, the patient may also have underlying digestive symptoms due to taking too many antibiotics or the patient may have difficulty with fluid transformation and the headache could be a manifestation of that. So, as with most concepts in the medical field, the treatment needs to be patient specific. Is traditional medicine and acupuncture successful? Yes, it is. Unfortunately, it creates unrealistic expectations to respond to your basic question with a didactic response. Knowing all your symptoms is a great starting place for a skilled practitioner and even yourself to start building your awareness of the complexity of how your organ systems interact. That said, headaches can respond well to acupuncture in the first treatment with significant reduction in pain that lasts 2 to 4 days after the first treatment. Follow-up treatments would be required depending on the length of time the condition has existed.
Acupuncture and Oriental medicine focus on treating the symptoms and the cause of a condition. Finding the cause is sometimes the most difficult and it might take time to discover it. In clinical practice, I usually say that if a patient has pain, there is a 99% chance of recovery however if the patient has had a surgery for the same condition it drops to 50%. The success rate will also be affected if the patient doesn't follow the protocol discussed with the practitioner.

Alexandre Hillairet, DAOM.
If you ask, "What is the success rate of acupuncture for headache treatment?" Then my experience is 90%.

In my clinic I have extremely high success rates treating migraines, nearly 100%. Not sure about the industry at large.
It is a bell curve as another medical intervention.
The success rate to relieve headaches with acupuncture is 99.9%.
Hello & thank you for your question! Success rates are dependent on the patient seeking care: how long have you been experiencing headaches? How severe are the headaches? Are you willing to get a treatment once a week (which will eventually taper off when your condition improves)? Are you willing to modify lifestyle/diet based on your Chinese medical diagnosis? In my experience, the more involved the patient is in their healing process, the better their results (and the quicker they will see them too)! Also, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) - it has been proven via controlled trials that acupuncture is an effective treatment for headache.
The variables are big, but in my practice, I have a 98% success rate. We cannot fix broken bones, but we can help it heal faster!

There is no single answer to success rates of any medication on an individual basis and your question is too vague to honestly answer it.

When it comes to pain management, though, acupuncture has been shown to be more effective than medications and has little to no side effects. So, I generally advise acu over meds for daily pains, headaches, muscle aches and the like.
Acupuncture can be very effective in treating headaches, but there are many factors that determine its success rate including the style of acupuncture you're receiving (different styles will resonate differently with your body and could be more or less effective than others), your compliance with your practitioner's treatment protocols (taking herbs, making dietary changes, exercises, etc.), and treatment frequency.
Depends on the condition, typically, 50-70% success rate.
Success rates for any kind of intervention, conventional or alternative, are very difficult to pin down. Most of the time, these statistics are generated at a population level and are difficult to extrapolate down to a given individual.

A lot will depend on:

1. What's being treated.
2. How long the patient has been experiencing the issue.
3. The experience of the provider in treating that particular issue.

I specialize in pain management and I work a lot with headache and migraine. My 'success' rate with these issues is hovers between 75% and 80% - assuming one thing:

1. Headaches generally have a lifestyle component - high stress, poor food choices, poor dietary habits (meal skipping), etc. If a patient can make lifestyle changes, generally I can help bring the headaches under control or eliminate them. Where I don't often see good results is when patients want to treat acupuncture like a pill - they only come in when there's an issue and do little to nothing on their own to make positive changes relative to their issue.

Another thing to be aware of is that acupuncture is rarely a 'one and done' type of treatment. Occasionally we hit the nail on the head at the first treatment and the problem goes away. More often we're looking at a series of 3-5 treatments to get things where we want them to be. Again, the lifestyle component can have a huge effect on how many treatments might be required.
It is about 80% rate.