MIGRAINES

We understand how you feel.

Simple tasks are difficult and exhausting. Sleep is elusive and your waking hours are stressful. It becomes easier - and less painful - to remain in a dark room rather than socialize with family and friends. Hours, days, and perhaps years of lost time are adding up.

You feel broken.

We take an entire picture of each patient's health for specific and tailored approach to treatment and care.

Neurological: Evaluating neurologically reveals that many migraine sufferers have an overactive nervous system and upper brain. In order to slow down an overactive nervous system and counter the cause of your migraines, we use:

• Exercise With Oxygen Therapy (EWOT) - Exercise With Oxygen Therapy, or EWOT, allows us to make adjustments to how the brain is firing specific to your unique brain function and brain-based therapies.
• Adjustments - Based on our evaluation using Exercise With Oxygen Therapy, we are able to adjust your spine, which then fires the less dominate side of the brain, bringing you back to a higher functioning level.

Metabolical: Many migraine suffers - and possibly you - have significant food sensitivities and intolerances in addition to their overactive nervous system. We evaluate how your metabolism is functioning using:

• Blood Panel Analysis - Blood sample testing allows us to evaluate the function of all your organs. In some cases these tests have revealed that the very supplements a patient was diligently taking to support their healthy were, in fact, the cause of their migraines.

GOING DEEPER

We can help break the migraine cycle, reduce the frequency, intensity and often stop migraines altogether.

The most accurate and compassionate way we use to describe migraine suffers is that they are broken. Broken by the intense pain when a migraine sets in and broken by the anxiety and stress of when the next migraine will begin. So many of our patients were losing work days and not socializing with family and friends. To cope, they found themselves choosing to hide in dark rooms becoming reclusive.

mi-graine (mi´grān) n : a symptom complex of periodic headaches, usually temporal and unilateral, often with irritability, nausea, vomiting, constipation or diarrhea, and photophobia, preceded by constriction of the cranial arteries, often with resultant prodromal sensory, especially ocular, symptoms (aura), and commencing with the vasodilation that follows.

There’s a growing discussion in the research community about a phenomenon called Cortical Spreading Depression (CSD) [add link to research article].  Research shows that just prior to the patient experiencing a migraine there’s a sudden onset of activity in the back part of the brain called the occipital lobe, followed by a sudden decrease in activity.  The upper brain stem starts over-firing and causes the blood vessels of the brain to inflame and then constrict causing the pain.  The over-firing in this occipital lobe also causes light sensitivities, inability to sleep, auras, increase in body temperature, sweating, and even heart palpitations. In other words, a migraine.

The cause of CSD - the over firing of the upper brain stem - is linked to chemical, emotional, and physical stress. While we may not be able to remove individual stresses from our lives, we are able to affect how our brain functions in reaction to them. Through Exercise With Oxygen Therapy (EWOT), adjusting, BBT, and metabolic solutions, such as eliminating food sensitivities, we are able to slow down the upper part of the brain stem and restore a migraine sufferer's life back to normal.

There’s an abundance of scientific evidence confirming that our brains are neuroplastic.  What is neuroplastic?  At one time it was thought that your brain, once not functioning properly, could not heal itself.  Remember being told when you were a kid not to hold your sneeze because it would kill your brain cells?  Well, you're in luck. A neuroplastic brain means that we will regenerate those pathways and recreate those brain cells. (Although we haven't been able to confirm whether holding in a sneeze has any harmful effects!) Therefore, adjusting and BBT is exercise for your brain while we give it all the fuel it needs.  We are enhancing how your brain works just as you would exercise, let’s say, your bicep.  If you noticed you were getting flabby arms or wanted to get stronger you would lift weights to strengthen your arms.  In a sense, we locate and activate the parts of your brain that are getting flabby or weak and perform exercises to strengthen your brain.