Tackling Migraines Head-On

YOU KNOW THE FEELING ALL TOO WELL —THE SEVERE

and incapacitating pain that seems to originate behind one eye or on the side of your head. The pain becomes so severe it’s difficult to concentrate, difficult to carry on with your day-to-day activities and difficult to enjoy life. You call them migraines, and you’ve been getting them for years. You may have even tried a variety of drugs and seen an array of doctors, all to no avail. Nothing really seems to help with the pain. Does this sound familiar?

Headaches are the second most common ailment causing people to seek chiropractic treatment, and can often be alleviated by chiropractic and nutritional changes when all other methods fail. By textbook definition, a migraine refers to a specific

type of headache occurring in the same area and unilateral (on one side of the head), or may originate behind the eyes, pulsating and unrelenting. Often a migraine can be preceded by a prodrome, which is a smell, taste, flash of light or some other indication a migraine is about to happen. In some people they may last for minutes, in others, hours. And oftentimes, common analgesics or over-the-counter pain relievers have no effect — even powerful antimigraine drugs may not work.

From a medical perspective, migraines are a specific type of headache identified by their symptoms and signs, but also associated with some vascular phenomenon at the base of the brain. Many migraine medications are aimed at changing the

vascularity by either constricting or dilating the arteries at the base of the brain, as well as the arteries that supply the brain itself. Although the vascular connection with classic migraines is well established in literature, the actual cause and effect is not. From a chiropractic perspective this is why many migraine medications such as Inderal, Imetrex and Fiorocet have little or no effect in some sufferers.

In my practice, I often see patients who claim they suffer migraines because they automatically refer to a very severe headache as a migraine. However, I have found in many cases, patients are not suffering from a “true” migraine, but a severe, incapacitating headache with migraine-like qualities. Many times these headaches can be caused by irritation, pinching or choking of the upper cervical nerves that supply the musculature of the neck and head, or by pinching or choking of the lower neck nerves, which supply the arms secondarily, causing spasms and pressure of the rear neck muscles, also known as cervicogenic headache.

In my clinical experience, chiropractic treatment has shown to be vastly effective in many cases of headaches where all other methods, including drug

therapy, have failed. Patients undergo a series of chiropractic adjustments or manipulations, often coupled with different types of physio-therapies, such as moist heat and ultrasound. After this is done repeatedly for a short period of time, as it has a cumulative effect, it can unchoke or reduce the irritation of the cervical nerves that caused the headache.