What Causes Migraines – Chiropractic Migraine Treatment

Looking for answers to migraines can be so frustrating.  We routinely see patients that have suffered from them for years, managing them with medications, but never really understanding why they suffer from them or what can be done long term to heal and get rid of migraines forever. Often patients who have seen many doctors have become aware of their individual triggers, often stress, lack of sleep, and different foods or chemicals can trigger migraines.  That does not however mean that those triggers are the cause, usually that they are the “straw that broke the camel’s back,” meaning a final small stressor in a completely stressed out system. Migraines are a sign of serious neurological malfunctioning of the brain, and while some can be debilitating and some have learned to work around them and even be quite functional, they should be seen as a major warning sign that the brain is not operating well and needs help.

As someone who used to suffer from migraines myself, I understand how disrupting they can be to life.  I began to get them in college, usually after putting my body through a good deal of stress. It took me months to realize they were actually migraines because the concept was so foreign to me.  For me, they would start with an aura, about an hour or two after intense exercise.  It would look like someone had just taken a thousand pictures with flashes in front of me, almost losing central vision completely.  That would last an hour or two and then go away. The next day the headache would come, sometimes lasting several days, and always with what I describe as severe brainfog.  There was always a fatigue and brain-fog associated with them, almost like a hangover, and that could last days.  I was finally diagnosed with “Exercise induced migraines,” and the solution given to me by my medical doctor was to not exercise as intensely and make sure I ate and was well hydrated before and after.  That was good advice and seemed to help decrease the frequency, however they began coming easier and easier, to the point where watching what I ate and drank no longer really seemed to help.

After I suffered a back injury and some damaged muscles playing rugby, I sought out a chiropractor, who also detected problems in my neck and began adjusting me there. The back injury healed, but the coolest thing happened, the migraines stopped!  This sparked my interest in helping others who suffered with migraines, and I knew that what I would learn in chiropractic school would help me do that.

What I have come to understand about migraines is that they are a sign that the body is under an immense amount of stress, which could be physical, chemical, or even emotional.  Usually it is a combination of several things, which is why changing diet might help (lowering chemical stress) but not cure them, or seeing a chiropractor may also help (lowering physical stress) but not necessarily cure migraines either.  This can be frustrating for a chronic migraine sufferer to navigate, when a treatment or intervention seems to work but doesn’t fully resolve the problem.  We have become very successful in our office with treating migraine patients and helping them find long term migraine relief. We do this by helping them lower stress from all angles, including physical stress (chiropractic and posture), chemical stress (food and other toxins), and emotional stress (through the use of Neuro-Emotional Technique (NET)). We also utilize the latest in mitochondrial therapy and biohacking with a very powerful class-IV laser that is able to penetrate the skull and stimulate energy production by brain cells, allowing them to heal their own environment much more rapidly than without this.

Chiropractic Migraine Treatment

Identifying the cause of the migraine helps us tailor each patients care plan to their need. Chiropractic migraine treatment is incredibly effective, and when combined with other forms of healing helps our patients get results, even when they have tried chiropractic and other natural methods for migraines before.  When we are able to reduce or remove the stresses, and maintain that for long enough that the brain can heal, migraines tend to stay gone forever.  Some signs that chiropractic needs to be a part of your migraine treatment protocol are when you have migraines and:

• neck pain
• osteoarthritis
• degenerative disc disease DDD
• degenerative joint disease (DJD)
• temporo-mandibular joint dysfunction TMJ/TMJD
• bruxism (grinding teeth at night)
• brain fog or declining memory
• sleep disturbances
• pinched nerve
• lower back pain
• bulging disc

Depending on what your specific structural and postural stress is, we are able to correct or reduce the stress through gentle chiropractic adjustments.  Almost always a migraine patient will have several structural stress patterns, including forward head posture, lack of cerebral spinal fluid flow (csf), cranial bone fixations, postural distortions, and upper cervical subluxations (misalignments of the upper neck and skull).  If you have already tried chiropractic and not seen the results, my suggestion would be to try again with a different practitioner. There are many techniques in chiropractic migraine treatment and finding the right one can make a huge difference.  We have become very skilled at identifying which techniques to use with each problem.