Can wearing earrings cause headaches?

Introduction

About of the US population experience headaches in their lifetime. Primary headaches are defined as not related to underlying medical conditions, and they can be divided into four groups, namely, tension-type, migraine, trigeminal autonomic cephalalgias, and other headache disorders (1).

The aim of this study is to demonstrate how certain individuals may have headaches as a result of wearing earrings, in accordance with auricular medicine, which examines the bodily representations in the ear.

Materials and methods

In three case reports, all of the female patients who came to my clinic for acupuncture treatments had pain that was primarily in the region near the eyes such as the frontal region. All of them were wearing earrings in both ears. I asked them to take out the earrings to see if the pain would resolve only by doing this procedure.

Results

The pain resolved within 5 min after removing the earrings in all three patients.

Discussion

Hippocrates (460–375 BCE) believed that “it is vital to explore other old medical traditions prior to the information we have today,” and this essay will be based on his ideas. For this reason, I will use a more than 5,000-year-old theory from traditional Chinese medicine to explain why wearing earrings can result in headaches (2).

According to auricular medicine, founded by Dr. Li-Chung-Huang, the ear has more than 700 points, and each point is representing one part of the body (3).

The ear is considered an inverted fetus, and all the points in the lower part of the ear represent the head, and the top of the ear represents the lower part of the body, such as the feet, as you can see in Figure 1 (3).

When the patient is wearing earrings, depending on the part of the ear that they are using the earrings on, they can cause the clinical manifestation of pain in the region that the earrings are in (the organs that they are representing in the ear could be affected), as I am presenting in the article that I wrote whose title is Can the Use of Earrings Cause Eye Pain? (4).

For this reason, headache symptoms are not reflecting only local manifestations, but the head is also receiving the energy of the lower limbs and the upper limbs, and the energy alterations in these meridians can cause headaches, as I present in the article Why Anti-Inflammatory Drugs Are Not Advisable for Headaches Associated With COVID-19? (5).

Figure 2 demonstrates the part of the ear that can induce headache symptoms when the patient is wearing earrings.

In Figure 2, the area of the ear where women usually wear earrings is area 8, the point that corresponds to the eye, as I demonstrate in my own post, “Can the Use of Earrings Cause Eye Pain?” But what I can notice in my clinical practice is that if the person who made the hole in the ear did it in a slightly different place than usual, the patient, instead of having pain in the eye, will have pain close to the eye, such as in the frontal region or the periocular region (4).

In Figure 2, you can see areas 5 and 6, which correspond to the temporal and malar regions. When the patient has earrings at these points, the patient can present pain in the malar region of the head.

We need to combine the viewpoints of Chinese traditional medicine and Western medicine in order to comprehend how wearing earrings might exacerbate headache symptoms, as Figure 3 demonstrates using the Yin and Yang metaphor.

In this metaphor, you can see that both medicines are opposites but complementary; when one ends, the other is beginning (6).

Conclusion

The aim of this study is to demonstrate that patients with headaches can have the use of earrings as a cause, and the first step in the treatment of this condition is to ask the patient to remove the earrings and wait for some minutes to see if the use of earrings could be the cause of headache manifestations. The removal of the earrings can stop the pain in a few minutes and treat the headache condition without the need to use anti-inflammatory medications.

References