Acupuncture Beats Drugs for Insomnia Relief
Acupuncture outperforms drug therapy for the treatment of insomnia.
Hangzhou Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine researchers compared the efficaciousness of auricular acupuncture with estazolam drug therapy for the treatment of insomnia in senior citizens. Estazolam, which is a sedative of the benzodiazepine class and has been used for short term insomnia, achieved an 82.9% total effective rate and auricular acupuncture achieved a 91.4% total effective rate! With Acupuncture, sleep quality, duration and daytime functioning were improved. With Estazolam, there were reports of undesirable side effects such as drowsiness.
There is a drug used for insomnia called Ambient. One of the side effects of this drug can be sleep driving! Sounds like a potentially dangerous side effect. I dont want sleep driving in my life.
drugs of course never come without side effects and these are serious one:
Common Short-Term Side Effects
- Drowsiness and fatigue
- Dizziness and light-headedness
- Loss of coordination (ataxia) and unsteadiness, which increases the risk of falls
- Confusion and slurred speech
- Memory problems, including trouble forming new memories
- Muscle weakness
- Physical dependence and tolerance, meaning your body needs more of the drug to get the same effect
- Addiction and substance use disorder
- Impaired thinking, concentration problems, and memory loss
- Respiratory depression, which slows or stops breathing and can be fatal, especially when combined with alcohol or opioids
- Overdose and death
The beauty of Acupuncture for treatment of insomnia
Most often paired with herbs, the treatments are gentle with no side effects. Treatments are essentially tailor made for each individual as there are no one solution for everybody.
Auricular acupuncture involves the application of hair thin needles to specific acu-points located on the outer surface of the ear. Estazolam is a benzodiazepine, a psychoactive drug in the same class as chlordiazepoxide (Librium) and diazepam (Valium). If you have ever taken any of these medications, you know they have side effects. Acupuncture has no side effect and body acupuncture along with auricular acupuncture is really very effective for sleep. Often an herbal prescription is added since sometimes we have to add a substance into the body for optimal results. In Oriental medicine, when we have insomnia, specially long term, then certain substances are depleted from the body which then makes it hard(er) to fall sleep and so the cycle repeats itself: insomnia depletes heart blood and yin, and without sufficient heart blood and yin we have difficulty falling sleep and staying sleep. When heart blood and yin are replenished, refreshing and rejuvenating sleep becomes easy. Give me a call and start sleeping soundly thru the night.
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