Juian Lin, M.D.
The patient, a forty-four-year-old female, had suffered severe headaches for more than ten years.
According to the patient, she lost consciousness for ten days due to a head concussion in elementary
school. She started having minor headaches after she regained consciousness. The CT scan and
then the MRI detected no signs of obvious cerebral hemorrhage.
When she was in her twenties, she fell and injured her brain again. After regaining consciousness a
day later, she started having severe headaches. Since her family ran a pharmacy and her husband
was a certified TCM practitioner, she tried various Western medications and TCM treatments, but to
little avail. Acupuncture and moxibustion could reduce her headaches only temporarily: pain relief
stopped as soon as the needles left her skin. Consultations and treatments at major hospitals by
various departments of neurology and neurosurgery could not alleviate her symptoms. The use of
addictive drugs, such as morphine, could moderate her pain for about half a day, but were
abandoned for the unbearable side effects (nausea and vomiting).
Half a year before she came to our hospital, she had given up on seeking further medical treatments.
Instead, she had started having several injections of nefopam hydrochloride each day to temporarily
combat the severity of her headaches. When no more veins could be found to make injections,
artificial blood vessels were surgically grafted in. Naturally, by this point, sleep-related problems
and depression accompanied her condition. She had attempted suicide many times. Her husband’s
Chinese medicine clinic had to be closed because of her condition. The effects of her pain were not
isolated to her alone, but included her family also.
Sepsis finally sent the patient to the department of infectious disease of our hospital after overly
frequent injections turned the artificially grafted blood vessels into a bacteria breeding ground.
However, after the infection was brought under control, fortunately, the problem of her headaches
remained unresolved. Hence, her attending doctor consulted with the head of the pain management
department, Dr. Chih-Shung Wong. When I accompanied Dr. Wong for his consultation with this
patient, I saw a helpless woman, rendered speechless from so much pain, seemingly seeking only
release from her suffering. Who knows how many other patients suffering from headaches are like
her, feeling like they would be better off dead than alive?
After the cranial CT scan confirmed no pathology, I treated her according to the treatment
principles of CMT. At first there was only slight improvement. However, after four consecutive
treatments, the headaches stopped recurring and left only low levels of heaviness. This patient had
never experienced such relief for more than ten years. After the completion of the treatment, she left
the hospital satisfied and with no need for medications. There was no recurrence of the pain
reported in telephone follow-ups during the next three months, and the patient was considered
cured. Furthermore, her husband was said to be reopening his Chinese medicine practice because
the recurrent headaches had been cured, and the entire family felt greatly relieved.
Juian Lin, MD
Department of Anesthesiology
Tri-Service General Hospital, Taiwan