In my case it was immediate. I had frozen shoulder syndrome from having played guitar 5 hours a night/6 nights per week at resorts down south. Each and every night I awakened in pain shooting down my arm. I would sit up, have the two Tylenol and water I placed by my bed each night, and wait, sometimes up to an hour, for the pain to subside enough to lay down again. When I went to a chiropractor, begging for help, she simply said ‘If you only have pain at night, it’s your pillow – get a buckwheat hull pillow.’ I found one (and thought, Oh my gosh, I just wasted my money – I bought a bag of corn flakes!), and yet, from the first night I was on my buckwheat hull pillow, I no longer awakened in pain. It was the excitement of this miracle (‘Why doesn’t EVERYONE know about these pillows!’) that lead me to return East, and open my company here in my home-town of Joggins. HOWEVER, if you have a pre-existing condition, what we have learned is that it can take up to a few weeks for your body to re-adjust to sleeping ‘normally’. Your muscles need time to stretch out, relax, and re-align. Just as you don’t go to a physiotherapist one time and are ‘cured’, so too is it the same for the pillow. In some instances our clients have reported an extremely uncomfortable sleep for a couple of weeks as the body learned to sleep straight, supported, and aligned. But, in the instance of one woman, who had lived for two years with chronic neck pain EVERY single day, that couple of weeks was well worth it. She told us that after a miserable two-plus weeks of sleeping on her buckwheat hull pillow, she awakened without the neck pain she had been living with daily, and has never had any since. She think two weeks of discomfort was well worth it! On the other hand, our massage therapist client who had daily headaches slept on our pillow ONE night, and stopped having her daily head-aches! It just depends on your condition. For the VERY VERY few, our pillow does not ‘work’
to help their condition at all. Either they have something so wrong with them that the pillow making them sleep ‘straighter’ actually causes pain, or whatever they have is just too severe for the pillow to make any improvements. We wished it would help every single individual who buys our pillow, but some people just can’t be helped with a pillow. Happily, most can!