Reduce Your Menopause Hot Flashes with Acupuncture

For most women, menopause begins in their sixth decade of life and lasts for about four to five years. Menopause symptoms range from hot flashes, anxiety, night sweats, sleep disturbances, and emotional problems due to hormonal imbalances. These symptoms can reduce your overall well being, and effect every part of your life. Due to this, it is important to find a solution to help reduce these issues, and more recently, acupuncture has gained traction in this field.

Why Choose Acupuncture to Treat Your Menopausal Symptoms?

Although HRT (hormone replacement therapy) is available and effective for many, it does come with a large array of side effects, as well as increasing your risk of developing breast cancer. Side effects of HRT range from dizziness, nausea, fatigue, and sleep disturbances.

Because acupuncture is a less-invasive approach to treating your symptoms in a more cost-effective manner, more and more women have been turning to it for treatment. Even though menopause is a natural part of aging, it does not mean that you need to suffer in silence- seek out the care you deserve so you can start to feel like YOU again.

A Recent Study Shows How Acupuncture Can Be Effective in Treating Symptoms

A Danish study published in BMJ Open shows that acupuncture truly may be worth considering as an option to treat your symptoms. The study found that after five weeks of acupuncture in women with moderate to severe symptoms of menopause had reduced hot flashes and night sweats, less sleep disturbances, and fewer emotional problems.

Although the study had initially chosen to focus on hot flashes- a symptom that over 75% of women suffer from while going through menopause, the study showed improvements in multiple areas as listed above.

How the Study Was Conducted

This study included 70 women who were experiencing moderate to severe symptoms of menopause. They first split the group in half, so that one group could act as the control group and received no intervention or treatment.

The other half of the women were given one 15-minute treatment session of acupuncture once a week for a total of five weeks. The acupuncturists used for the study had an average of 14 years of experience in the field.

Each of the participants in the study completed questionnaires to assess their menopause symptoms, filled out before the study began, then after week 3, week 6, 8, 11, and then 26 weeks later. The questionnaire covered the most common menopausal symptoms (including hot flashes, sleep issues, memory changes, urinary and vaginal symptoms, and skin changes/issues).

Even after just three weeks, the participants in the group receiving acupuncture noted a decrease in hot flashes. At the 6-week mark, 80% of the women in the acupuncture group believed that the treatments had helped reduce their symptoms- not just their hot flashes.

So, if you’re considering acupuncture to help reduce your menopause symptoms and help control your hot flashes​, why not join the women in the study, and benefit from all the ways that acupuncture treatment can help to get you feeling great again?!