Buckwheat pillows have many benefits. Some of them are easily explained and verified scientifically, but then there are those that people experience and proclaim, but are not so easily verified. These are termed anecdotal. These are things that seem to work for some, but not others.
They’re the things that one person will swear by, while others laugh at. Sometimes these things eventually gain at least a certain degree of acceptance, like for example acupuncture.
Many years ago I heard about acupuncture, which was then mostly considered a sort of voodoo by many of us Westerners, while generally accepted as a legitimate medical treatment by many Orientals. My first wife suffered greatly with epileptic seizures, chewing her tongue terribly and having headaches that lasted for days. I was desperate.
We decided to try acupuncture. While it didn’t completely cure her, it made a tremendous difference. It completely eliminated the tongue chewing, and greatly diminished the other aspects to where the seizures could be controlled by medication, and she soon was able to get her drivers license and live a normal life. After that, we could be counted among those who championed acupuncture. My first wife has been deceased for some years now, but I would still certainly recommend trying acupuncture in circumstances such as my wife’s.
What does all this have to do with buckwheat pillows? Good question. But there are many benefits attributed to buckwheat pillows by some people which may not be proven by scientific means, and which may not seem to work for all individuals. For example, my present wife’s granddaughter stopped in one day with a headache (which she is prone to) that she had been enduring for three days.
She asked my wife if she would watch her children for a while so she could lie down, because she was feeling really badly. Of course my wife agreed, and she also brought to her her buckwheat bed pillow to rest on. Because of her headache, she hadn’t been able to sleep for three days, but she immediately fell asleep, and slept all day.
When she awoke, the first thing she said was “What kind of pillow is this. I’ve never slept so well in my life. I have to have one of these. My headache is completely gone.” My wife, being the selfless soul that she is, gave her her buckwheat pillow. Shannon, her granddaughter took it home and made the mistake of telling her husband about it. Even bigger mistake - she let him try it out. They both wanted to sleep on the same pillow - hard to do. We came to the rescue and gave him one for Christmas, and peace, to say nothing of sound sleep, has been restored to the house hold.
This is one example among many, of anecdotal claims attributed to buckwheat pillows. Science may not be able to prove them all, and they may not all work for everybody all the time, but for my money, they work often enough to be “worth their weight in gold”.






