More Findings On The Daith Piercing

October 24, 2017 / Thomas Cohn, MD

As you’re probably aware if you read this blog, we’ve been helping push patients who have undergone the Daith Piercing for headaches to Dr. Chris Blatchley’s website. Dr. Blatchley has been attempting to conduct one of the foremost studies on the Daith Piercing, and he recently completed his findings. You can see the full results from Version 1 of the study by clicking here. If that link is no longer working, head to his website and look for a link to the survey results.

Before we get into some of the findings in Version 1, Dr. Blatchley reached out to us to see if we could help direct people to take a second version of the Daith Piercing survey. This will again help us learn more about pain pathways and how the piercing may help some individuals with certain types of headaches and migraines. So if you haven’t yet taken the second version of the Daith Piecing Survey, please click here and consider taking a couple minutes to help advance our medical knowledge.

Daith Piercing Survey Results

As we mentioned above, you can take a closer look at the full report by clicking the above link, but here are some of the takeaways in bullet point form:

More than 1,250 individuals completed the survey.

98.5 percent of survey respondents were women.

90% had seen a family doctor and 40% a medical specialist. 44% had underwent a brain/MRI scan.

Roughly 80 percent of patients said they were either “Delighted” or “Very Happy” with the results from the Daith Piercing in terms of headache relief at measured intervals after receiving the piercing (first 30 days, 1-3 months, 4-6 months, etc.).

Only 2.6% of respondents said they were “Very Unhappy” with the piercing, with the most common reason why being that it did not provide them with headache relief.

Interestingly, the side the piercing was on was split almost right down the middle. 51 percent got the piercing in their right ear, while 49 percent got it in their left ear.

About 20 percent of respondents had both ears pierced with the Daith technique.

The majority of respondents reported a decrease in symptoms of headache frequency after undergoing the piercing, and many of these decreases occurred quickly after the piercing was administered.

For more information about the study, or to check out the results, I urge you to head over to Dr. Blatchley’s site. Hopefully Version 2 of the study will be as enlightening as the first version.

The Daith Piercing Survey Is Complete!

September 28, 2017 / Thomas Cohn, MD

If you’ve been following this blog, you probably remember that we’ve been helping Dr. Chris Blatchley collect responses for a study he was conducting on the Daith piercing and vagal nerve stimulation. We’re happy to report that the first report of the findings has been published.

You can find the first report on the role of Daith piercings and vagal nerve stimulation by clicking here. That link will take you to the report, but updated versions of the report can be found on Dr. Blatchley’s main site, which you can get to by clicking here, so be sure to visit the site in the future to see the updated reports.

You Can Still Take The Study

Although the first version of the findings are in, you can still participate in the study if you haven’t taken the survey yet. Remember, this is an updated version of the survey, so even if you completed the survey in the past, you may still be eligible to complete the second version. To take the second version of the daith survey, click here.

Thank you to everyone who helped Dr. Blatchley with his research. He’s informed me that’s he has shared the findings with the British Medical Journal, and he hopes that they will publish the findings. If they are published, it would be the first of its kind research published in a medical journal! He’s also planning to release a full research article in the future based on the second version of the survey.

So please check out the findings, and keep your fingers crossed that they’ll make their way to the BMJ. The more migraines and vagal nerve stimulation are talked about in major medical journals, the more eyeballs we’ll have on the problem, and the more people we’ll have working towards a solution. Thanks to everyone who took part in the survey, and congrats to Dr. Blatchley for finishing the first version of the findings.

Updating The Daith Piercing Survey

August 23, 2017 / Thomas Cohn, MD

We wanted to give you another quick update on the Daith piercing survey that a colleague of mine is running in order to help us better understand how the Daith piercing may help individuals with chronic headaches. This update won’t have a lot of information, but that’s a good thing. Medical journals are pretty picky when it comes to publishing studies that have already been published in another source, so in order to ensure the findings get shared in a major medical journal, this update can only speak in generalities.

Daith Piercing Update

That being said, this update is also encouraging. Over 1,000 people have taken part in the survey so far, and you still have time to do so if you haven’t taken it yet. You can participate in the survey by following this link and answering the questions on that page.

The results show very promising results when it comes to successful management of certain headaches with the Daith piercing. To be safe, that’s all we can really say right now, but we still need your help. My colleague Dr. Chris Blatchley, who is running the study, has created a second version of the Daith piercing survey to address some areas that he felt the first version did not adequately cover. If you are willing, please click here to take the second version of the survey. Regardless of whether you completed version one or not, it would be wonderful if you could take a couple of minutes to fill out the new version of the survey. The first version of the survey is no longer available, to the two links we’ve posted in this blog will take you to the same place.

Thank you so much for taking the time to help us get a better understanding of the Daith piercing and how it may be able to help certain patients. We promise to keep you updated about future studies, this study’s results, as well as when and where the full data analysis will be published. Thank you for your continued support, and please reach out to Dr. Blatchley if you have any questions. You can visit his website by clicking here.

Thanks!

Dr. Cohn

Early Findings From The Daith Piercing Study

June 2, 2017 / Thomas Cohn, MD

As we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, a colleague of mine decided that he wanted to conduct some research on the daith piercing among individuals who have sought out the piercing for migraine relief.

As someone who has written numerous blogs on the subject, I wanted to help spread the word about the study, and of course I am interested in the results. So if you have a daith piercing and you haven’t take the survey yet, please click here to take it!

Daith Piercing Survey

Although the study is still in the collection phase, Dr. Chris Blatchley of the London Migraine Clinic was kind enough to share some of the early findings from the survey. We thought it would be interesting to share some of those findings with you before the results are really broken down and trends are discovered. So below, you’ll see some findings from the early batch of responses to the daith study.

The vast majority of respondents have had the piercing for 18 months or fewer. This is likely due to the fact that the daith piercing has only recently gained popularity in the pain care/migraine community.

Of the 50 or so respondents who have had migraines for over 10 years and had the daith piercing for over one year, 38 percent reported having migraines most days and only two percent said they had gone a month with one or fewer migraines. Since getting the piercing, only six percent report migraines on most days, and a whopping 69% say their migraines have been reduced to one or fewer a month.

The general consensus is that the majority of individuals who underwent the daith piercing procedure for migraine relief showed marked improvement in all modalities, although it is worth nothing that for a small percentage of individuals, their migraines got worse after the piercing.

These early results are interesting, and although this is only a surface level interpretation, we’re intrigued by the results. There are some obvious limitations in that the survey relies not only on self-reporting, but also self-reporting pain levels from years ago. However, the survey is certainly a huge step in the right direction for understanding pain pathways and harnessing the power of the daith piercing for the right patient.

One final thing we hope to glean from the study is a better understanding of the placebo effect on patients who undergo the procedure. Is their pain truly being resolved because it is helping stop the transmission of pain signals, or are people experiencing better results simply because they expect to? It’s a fascinating angle, but when you consider that the placebo effect has not been shown to be as effective in other medical interventions, it certainly seems like there is a credible link between the piercing and migraine relief in some individuals!

We’ll keep tabs on the survey as it continues, and be sure to take the survey if you haven’t yet!

Help Us Learn More About Daith Piercings

May 11, 2017 / Thomas Cohn, MD

The internet is a wonderful thing. Not only has it made it easier for patients to find information, but it has also allowed doctors who would never otherwise meet to connect with one another. The latter recently happened with us.

As we’ve mentioned on the blog before, our posts on daith piercings have far and away been our most popular, which is interesting because the science behind why the piercing may help alleviate headache pain isn’t perfectly clear. However, we are working on changing that. Recently, we were contacted by Dr. Chris Blatchley from across the pond at the London Migraine Clinic. Dr. Blatchley has been helping patients find relief from migraine pain for years, and he has worked closely with a colleague who has performed more than 3,000 daith piercings. He stumbled upon our fascination with the piercing, and combined with his own experience, Dr. Blatchley has decided to try to compile some concrete evidence about why the piercing is effective for some patients.

Daith Piercing Study

To best do this, Dr. Blatchley put together a survey questionnaire on his website London-Migraine-Clinic.co.uk. On his website, he has a link to the survey which he hopes to use to gather responses from individuals who have undergone a daith piercing for pain relief. You can access the survey by clicking the link that will take you to his site, or you can go directly to the survey by clicking the link below.

Daith Piercing Questionnaire

The survey will only take a couple of minutes to complete, but we believe it will be a valuable tool for getting a collection of responses from individuals who have firsthand experience with the piercing and its effects. So please, if you’ve undergone the procedure, take a few minutes to complete the survey and share it with others who have received the piercing. The more we learn about pain pathways, the more pain we can take out of this world!

Thanks,

Dr. Thomas Cohn