There’s a particular kind of guilt that comes with being a parent who’s sick all the time — not flu-sick, not contagious-sick, but the kind of sick that locks you in a dark room in the middle of a Saturday afternoon while your kids watch another movie downstairs. My migraines didn’t just hurt. They took me away from my family, over and over again, and I never stopped feeling like I was failing everyone around me every time one hit.
I’m a mom of two — ages eight and eleven — and I live outside Manchester, NH. I’d had migraines since college, but after my second child they got worse. More frequent. Harder to predict. By the time I finally started counting, I was losing four to six days a month to them. Some were manageable with medication and a dark room. Others lasted three days and left me wrung out for another two after that.
| When the Medication Stops Being Enough
I’d been through the whole medical circuit. Neurologist, preventive medications, two different triptans. My medication helped take the edge off when I caught a migraine early enough, but it wasn’t stopping them from coming — and my doctor had told me plainly that I was already at the limit of what she felt comfortable prescribing. We talked about Botox injections. I wasn’t ready for that, mostly because the idea of doing something that permanent-feeling to my head every three months made me uneasy.
I started reading about acupuncture for migraines during one of those 2 a.m. can’t-sleep stretches that follow a bad migraine day. Honestly, I almost closed the tab. Acupuncture felt like something people tried when they were out of options and willing to believe anything. I didn’t want to be that person. I wanted an actual solution.
But I kept reading. And something about what I found — clinical research, not just testimonials — made me think it might at least be worth a conversation.
| Finding Trend Acupuncture in Concord
A friend from my kids’ school — she lives in Bedford — had mentioned Trend Acupuncture maybe a year before. She’d been going for something unrelated, but she’d mentioned Kristen Markwith specifically, said she was different from what she expected. I’d nodded and moved on. After that 2 a.m. research spiral, I dug up the name and called the next morning.
Trend Acupuncture is in Concord, NH, about 25 minutes from me. Dr. Kristen Markwith has her Doctorate in Acupuncture and has spent 14 years focused on exactly the kind of stubborn, recurring conditions that don’t respond cleanly to standard treatment. When I called and explained my history — the frequency, the medication ceiling I’d hit, the way they seemed to cluster around stress and weather changes — the person I spoke with didn’t treat it like a simple booking. They asked real questions. That was the first sign.
| What Kristen Actually Did Differently
My first appointment with Kristen was longer than I expected. She went through my full history — not just the migraines, but my sleep, my stress levels, my hormonal patterns, how my neck and shoulders held tension, what I ate, what my cycle looked like. She talked about how migraines aren’t just a head problem; they’re the body’s alarm system signaling something deeper is dysregulated. That framing made more sense to me than anything I’d heard in a neurologist’s office.
“She talked about how migraines aren’t just a head problem — they’re the body’s alarm system. That made more sense to me than anything I’d heard in a neurologist’s office.”
The acupuncture itself was calm. She worked points at the base of my skull, along my shoulders, and at specific spots on my hands and feet that she explained were connected to the pathways involved in migraine patterns. I didn’t feel a dramatic shift after session one. But I slept better that night than I had in weeks.
A few sessions in, Kristen introduced ATP Resonance BioTherapy® — a low-level electrical frequency treatment that helps reduce inflammation and improve circulation at the cellular level. She used it along the muscles at the base of my skull and upper neck, which she said were chronically contracted and likely contributing to the frequency of my episodes. It felt like a gentle hum, nothing uncomfortable, and I noticed my neck was measurably looser in the days that followed.
She adjusted the treatment every single visit based on where I was in my cycle, how my stress had been that week, whether I’d had a migraine since I last saw her. People make the drive from Londonderry and Salem to see her, and I understood why — she paid attention in a way that felt rare.
| What Life Looks Like Now
In the three months before I started at Trend, I had counted seventeen migraine days. In the three months after my sixth session, I had five. Five. I kept the same log, same criteria. I’m not telling you that to oversell it — I’m telling you because I was the person who rolled her eyes at acupuncture, and those numbers are real.
More than the numbers: last month I made it through my daughter’s birthday party — the whole thing, from cake to cleanup — without having to disappear upstairs. She’s eight. She noticed. She told me afterward that it was the best party she’d ever had, and I know she meant the decorations and the friends, but I also know I was there for all of it. That’s the part I keep coming back to.
I still get migraines. I still have medication for the bad ones. But they’re not running my calendar anymore, and I’m not dreading the next one the way I used to. If you’re in the southern New Hampshire area — Manchester, Bedford, anywhere within reach of Concord — and you’ve been managing migraines with a ceiling you can’t push past, it’s worth making the call. I waited a year longer than I should have.
