Decoding Migraines: The Vascular Root Cause

the information provided is for educational purposes and is not intended to diagnose or treat any conditions the lifestyle interventions discuss should not be used as a substitute for conventional medical therapy okay everyone welcome back to another episode I'm wearing the same shirt because I'm doing three in a daze so when you guys see me online so welcome back to another episode of integrative wellness radio we've been talking all about the neurological system for the past few podcasts but today we want to really cover the topic of migraines and I think that you know migraines are just something that is they're so painful and so debilitating I've definitely had one or two in my life and I really feel for the people that suffer with them on a day to day basis because they compromise everything they they compromise you know your activities of daily living just you just feel overall legitimately terrible I think I've only had one and I was like the biggest baby I don't know how people do it yeah you know and it's interesting too because one of my patients that's coming in the past few months she has had debilitating migraines since she was in her 20s she's now in her 50s and she literally has had so many prescriptions over time but at the time of coming in she has six prescriptions hardcore prescriptions that she knows how to manipulate in order to dissolve the type of migraine because she has various types of migraines and she's like well based off of when I wake up I kind of know because they're every day I know what type is coming so I know that if I take a half of this pill and mix it with one of this and then at two o'clock I take one of these and I'm just sitting there and I'm like oh my gosh like this is just so horrible that you know I'm glad you figured it out but this is just so horrible that you suffer with these every day and it's to the capacity that you're acting as your own pharmacist in order to you know to combat these and live your life so you know the really crazy thing about this woman specifically is that when we did her testing one of the things that was revealed was that she had massive massive blood flow issues to the brain and there were two parts of the brain that were the most compromised one was the frontal cortex the second part was the substantia [ __ ] which is your hippocampus it's where you have your short-term memories convert into long-term memory so first you see your short-term memory go and then you start to have issues with your long-term memory but the further that that degenerates you can develop Parkinson's as well and as we were doing the testing I started to notice things about this woman and I noticed that her facial expressions she didn't really have many facial expressions and I wasn't sure it was because of some of these hard core medications that she was on or if that was just kind of her so as I saw this coming up I was like you know let's do a quick neurological test and I had her walk I noticed that her she had no more arm swing also notice she was really unstable so it actually caused her to walk with her legs spread apart in order to try to keep herself more stable and her eyes very bloodshot and I asked her I was like are your eyes bloodshot a lot and she's like yeah pretty much every day wakes up with a pretty low low-grade headache that develops into a migraine so I tell you this story because one of the most common things that we see as a practice when people come in with these headaches sinus pressure tension headaches or full-blown migraines is that there is usually some level of the cardiovascular system being involved it's almost always yes I think it's confusing when I say cardiovascular system for people because they think heart you know they think about that but you have blood flow everywhere and you don't necessarily have to have a problem with your heart but you can have problems with your blood vessels and you can easily have get your blood pressure taken and have it be low when they measure it in the arm but you can actually have elevated blood pressure in the deeper vessels of your thorax and in your head and we'll have you you know make sense of this of why this happens this way but the longer this goes on the law the more inclined you are to have neurological degeneration and it's because one of the things that your brain thrives on is oxygen so any tissue without oxygen becomes very compromised and we get our oxygen from our blood exactly so that nutrients and that's the other thing too is even you know when people talk about cancer and what cancer is and what cancer cells are cancer cells are healthy cells that became unhealthy and the major shift that happens from healthy to unhealthy is that all of your cells no matter if it's a liver cell a brain cell you know a kidney cell they all need oxygen every single cell needs oxygen to survive so if your cells become compromised if they become suffocated with scar tissue if they become compromised through toxicity or some type of infection those cells will have to learn how to live without oxygen and that shift from an aerobic which is an oxygen absorbing cell to an anaerobic cell which is it has to learn how to live without oxygen that is a mutation that we call a cancer cell the nice thing is that usually the body's gonna give you some symptoms some feedback mechanisms to tell you hey I'm not getting oxygen with a headache and a migraine being one of those big symptoms to the brain exactly so we need to look at a headache or a migraine as being that warning sign not necessarily being oh this is genetic this runs in my family and there's a lot of you know things that will compromise mmm the way that the blood is flowing in and out of a head but you know just to give you like a basic foundation for what does your brain actually need it needs oxygen through proper flowing blood it also needs glucose so despite as much as we talk about how sugar so bad for you and it is but your brain does run on glucose and when you eat vegetables which is technically a carbohydrate when you eat fruit when you eat like Whole Foods some of those foods do break down into carbohydrates or they break down into glucose and your brain will use that as fuel but unfortunately in our lovely what do they call it the standard American diet sad sad diet so the standard American diet most of our glucose or sugars are attached to fat and you know when you think about fettuccine alfredo you know you're getting the glucose from the pasta but it's covered in cheese and you know butter fat if you're having chocolate or ice cream like there's fat in the mix of most of the glucose that we're consuming even with vegetables you know you eat broccoli you're covering it in cheese to make it taste better so we're doing this and not necessarily understanding that when we mix it with fat the brain is not necessarily using it as fuel at that point so then we have a bunch of excess sugar floating around in our blood which is what actually causes the constriction and compromises the way the blood is flowing to all parts of the body but especially the brain yeah I mean when you look at the brain blood flow there's so many different things and like clinically there's like I just talked about you want to separate those those two a hundred percent and then you can look at you know the physical body there's tons of problems that can be literally not allowing the blood so when you look at the brain you want to look at blood flow in two ways you know blood flow to the brain but also blood flow out of the pain and both can be problematic so it's like both can cause the migraine both can cause the migraines so one of the things that I find clinically a lot is really just most people think of like the ox but neck and you know you talk to a chiropractor and like we got to check out your your first cervical vertebra you know and that's all 100% but honestly what I find more is the rib cage the rib cage because the when you think about it all of our big veins and arteries are coming a collar right around the collarbone and the majority of people today they are their posture sucks they're literally and like this protective sympathetic state which has its own problems in our life forgetting that we're podcasting and video Inc so he's doing this motion I'm super those of you that are listening and can't actually see him but what he's saying is that you're hunched over with your shoulders rolled forward yep yes thank you I'm very visual so with that being said your shoulders are rolled forward when your shoulders roll forward the ribcage drops down and out and that really pretty much compresses the neck will compress the clavicle and collarbone collarbone thank you and won't allow that proper blood flow up to the brain but also won't allow the blood flow to circulate out of the brain as well and that's gonna create and lead to pretty much the symptoms of migraines and headaches well I think it's just huge because this is the structural piece that dr. Nick is talking about because when it comes to what is impeding the blood flow it's it could be structural and it could be a couple of other things but one disclaimer that I want to make too is that when you really think about blood flow and all of its pumping out from the heart and you know the farthest parts away from the heart is your hands and feet so if you're a person who's struggling with cold hands and feet chances are you're also not getting proper circulation up to the head because not only is the head one of the other farthest distances from the heart but it's also has to go up against gravity so getting blood flow into the head is also harder than getting it into other places and there's so many things that that can affect that yeah it's just like you know I talked about ribcage and what I found best results working on that blood flow is kind of like starting on the foundational structures and then once those are corrected then working on the things that are like above it because I always give a scenario it's like you know you don't want to go into a house that you're gonna like blacking out remediation renovate is already definitely not a construction worker but as you're going through that's like I always say it's like you you wouldn't redo your kitchen in your bathroom if foundationally that needs to be worked on first so it's like working on the spine working on the ribcage and then once that's strong if there's that hasn't corrected the symptoms physically you want to go in and you can check the oral like you can check the palate and make sure the actual palate and looking at all the actual facial bones and one of the most important ones it's the sphenoid because it will literally torque and when that torques it throws every single other skull bone around the brain out of its proper position as well so it's making sure that all of the cranial bones all the bones in your skull all the bones in your face all the bones in your mouth and everything down foundationally holding that head up is in proper position to allow just mechanically that's yeah well just even backtracking is you know you might be thinking like well why would my ribcage be a problem so part of it is the posture that Nick is talking about but one of the big reasons why you can have issues in your rib cage that you know compromise the structure that are impeding the blood flow is car accidents with a seatbelt on so when you have a seatbelt on and you get thrown forward or even to the side you have a tendency to have a pretty significant impact on your sternum as well as on your rib cage so that's one of the ways that your rib cage can become compromised in the first place and the other one is just impact so you know I had a patient the other day I was talking to and he was talking about migraine and he was talking about a lot of neck problems and I was like have you had any head injuries have you had any car accidents and he's like no no definitely no injuries and then mom chimes in she goes he's a hockey player I was like oh like you've had plenty of impact injuries so you know when you're playing football you're playing hockey you're playing other things that you're getting tackled potentially getting the wind knocked out of you you can easily have issues that are happening in the collarbone in the ribcage let alone if you've actually had a shoulder problem you had frozen shoulder you tore your ACL like all of those things are significant that not many people are necessarily saying are connected to your headaches and migraines because it's not that the shoulder is like shooting the pain up to your head it's that these misalignments the the scar tissue you know the muscle adhesions that is impeding the blood flow in and out so I mean and there is that muscle attachment that could just be comes to be pulling to create that headache oh yeah not so much really a migraine though definitely so that's why you hear about some people that get you know physical therapy or they get chiropractic and they're like oh my gosh this radically changed my migraines because the foundation for that person was truly structural there are many other people that it's a little bit different of a ballgame so if you have a person who is you know dealing with the migraines again because of blood flow the blood flow might be compromised because they have really really abnormal blood sugar and I want to touch on this because I think that when we get our blood work done and if your blood your glucose or your hemoglobin a1c are elevated or slightly elevated you know you get put in this category of pre-diabetic or diabetic and that's when that's what we classify as bad but if you have low blood sugar nobody's necessarily saying that that causes problems we're just like oh you're low blood sugar you know just make sure you keep a candy bar on you in case your sugar dips and in reality low blood sugar or being hypoglycemic is just as problematic for your brain and your blood vessels as being a diabetic and I will describe what this looks like because every time describe it to a patient they like laughs because like holy crab that you just told me my biography but it's the hypoglycemic people are the people that wake up in the morning they're not very hungry if anything you might even like have an aversion to food be like oh I couldn't even imagine eating right now that's when you're really severe hypoglycemic but you're not hungry you have some coffee some other type of caffeine it suppresses your appetite you get to lunchtime you're like oh my god I'm starving and you usually intuitively want something with carbs either you want your sushi roll your rice bowl your sandwich your burrito then you're like oh god food coma can't even function you need your midday coffee you do it again you wait til dinner oh my gosh I'm starving you're eating cheese and crackers you eat your dinner now you want something sweet I say and then you sit on the couch and then you say oh the couch and watch TV so this is something that so many people are doing and I'm laughing because this was me and then the best part is is that intermittent fasting became a thing and I was like oh I'm intermittent fast oh no this is good this is good so intermittent fasting is great but you should not intermittent fasting days a week you should intermittent fast two to three times a week because if you do it too many days it is going to put your body in a hypoglycemic state but it puts you in survival mode so your body actually starts to store fat because it thinks it's it's preparing for a famine yep and I mean it you're teaching your body to hold on to your glucose at the same time instead of just like let's use my glucose up and then get into that you know yeah genic state so well and when you're dealing with this low blood sugar what's happening is that you're eating something you could be the healthiest eater in the world but if you'll you are already hypoglycemic you eat you know a nice big salad with maybe some berries on it and maybe you know you have a dressing that has a little bit of sugar that will spike and crash you let alone if you're doing like heavy on the carbs sandwiches you know rice bowls what's gonna just happen is you're just gonna be on a roller coaster all day of spike crash spike crash so this is going to screw up how well your pancreas is making what we call insulin and just to make it simple is that insulin pretty much allows your cells including your brain cells to use the glucose so if you don't have insulin you can't use the glucose so it just floats around in your bloodstream and screws up your blood flow so your blood sugar can very much be a culprit to your migraines and a lot of people resonate with this because they're like you know what what I don't eat I definitely get a headache or a migraine so that is a sign that your blood sugar is extremely unstable and the other thing too is if you get super irritable if you haven't eaten for a while if you get shaky if you faint like you're you're you know you're on that severe spectrum the hungriness hangry yes but unfortunately I know at least for my patients that I'm seeing I think everybody has somewhat of a blood sugar problem right now is that safe to say for your patients as well it's almost hundred percent yeah and I'm not saying severe but I'm saying it's just right now like I'll give you an example I was the big Starbucks vanilla mint latte was a phase and then there was the mocha latte was a phase but like that was my jam I love that stuff I thought you still sound really passionate about it I'm very passionate about it I don't do it very often but when I started to get into this world and started to learn more about nutrition and I was like you know what all right should do the syrups I need to get off the dairy and I switched to you know I think at first it was almond milk and then it was the coconut milk lattes and when I made myself a coconut milk latte at my house I was like mmm it's taste different and what I realized is that you know I think I'm doing better I'm not adding any physical sugar to my drink but the coconut milk alone had you know almost 30 grams of sugar in it so it's like we are not always aware of how much sugar we're being exposed to on a day-to-day basis an adult soda literally somebody was somebody posted something funny the other day and they were saying take or drinking kombucha for probiotics is like like drinking soda for energy or like some things like that and you don't really think about it because you hear all this great stuff about kombucha but really some of these companies that are making it it's chock full of sugar as well so we really need to you know pay more attention to how much sugar intake you know we're having but it's also about how are we eating are we just never eating breakfast and or if we're starting our day with muffins bagels waffles pancakes like that's also gonna completely destroy your blood sugar stability through the day so these are all important things to consider when you're suffering with migraines did you want to talk a couple more other symptoms oh yeah good so I think we might have talked about this a couple podcast before but the gallbladder Meridian I mean there's some other meridians but it's like when you if you google meridians over the head literally the gallbladder Meridian takes up both temples so it's like making sure not only that you know digestive Lee that your liver your gallbladder everything's working properly but then also making sure that you know you're getting your meridians evaluated so that there's no energetic stress because if those meridian points aren't aren't flowing they're gonna create that tension and that build up the brain is very sensitive and you can have you the headaches or the migraines coming just from literally that meridian point being a stagnant well I'm glad you said that too because I think it is important for people to know that the location of your headache or migraine actually means something different so like dr. Nik is saying is if you constantly have issues with your temples then that can definitely be correlated to the gallbladder because like he said like literally if you google it it just comes up and wraps like right to the temple but then a lot of people have you know frontal headaches or migraines so frontal is very big with the blood sugar and it's because one of the parts of your brain that is most impacted by glucose is your prefrontal cortex which is just think of your forehead so the major blood sugar people they're gonna have headaches in the front of the head don't get me wrong obviously sinuses can play a role in that but the the people that are really struggling with the blood flow especially if the blood flow is coming from neck being out of alignment a lot of congestion in the glands or the lymph nodes or that collarbone ribcage issue they're gonna get the headaches behind the eye and the headaches behind the eyes sometimes it's both sometimes it's moves they say oh sometimes is my left sometimes it's my right but that can very much be correlated to the physical stuff that we talked about but it can also be very correlated to the blood not flowing out because you have all these swollen glands that are impeding how the veins are draining the blood out and then it's a lot of the the headaches and migraines and back that tends to be more neurological to the eyes so there's usually a cranial nerve issue or some type of issue that's happening through the eyes are quote-unquote being overworked and just because there's some dysfunction happening there so then and that's one of the podcasts that I want to talk about to moving forward is we want to do something about how bad vision is associated with you know a bad brain essentially but you know I think it's really relevant here talking about the migraines because there are people that have that aura or they have that visual involvement or they have to go and have the lights off and their eyes closed and they need that complete darkness so really that's a sign that the back of the brain the occipital lobe is involved and you know it maybe is starting with the eyes or maybe it started with a head injury you know every single person's really different but if you're also a person that has bloodshot eyes pretty consistently that's a blood flow issue so you could have a blood flow issue that actually can almost create a low-grade glaucoma that's what glaucoma is is intraocular pressure so that can start the eyes which screws up the cranial nerves which screws up your brain so it becomes you know it can start with you have the head injury which caused the vascular issues or the vascular issues can start to compromise the brain so it can definitely happen vice versa so for those of you that have had concussions or you've had you know some good bumps to the head you know you it's not that you know you necessarily have scar tissue or you have you know post concussive syndrome you might actually have compromised how well the blood can flow to that area of the brain so that's actually even a funny story to is I had a patient and so when I do my consultations now I ask questions so many different ways and it like just keeps building and building because I used to you know just ask like have you had any head injuries and I'm like before you answer I don't necessarily mean concussions but you know any good bumps to the head did you play soccer and head the ball you know did you play field hockey and you know get whacked in the head one time and then you know if you oh no no no no definitely not so I was using one of our technologies called the bio resonance on one of our patients who knowed me to death about head injuries and because her big complaint was visual and it was specifically just on one side so if her vision is only compromised on one side I start thinking okay well there's something neurologically going on because otherwise it would be both eyes so so I start doing her bio resonance scan which is very visual and you can check it out on our website and she has but so black means dysfunction she has black overlaying the blood vessels of the left side of her frontal cortex and I was like so you're sure nothing happened and I noticed she had a little scar and I was like so what's that scar from and she's like oh my god I got hit with a golf club when I was in college she's like I was golfing and yeah this girl just turn around and whacked me in the head by accident and I was like oh so now I asked do you have scars on your head this is another way that I asked my questions but she it wasn't that she necessarily had headaches she actually had a lot of visual problems on that side and a lot of it came back to the blood flow issues that was happening to the eye the optic nerve as well as the frontal cortex of the brain crazy stuff I know it's so cool though I like dork myself out so hard every day at work because it's just like so fun casing the puzzle together for people so should we do a little recap of the different systems and what can be done to actually heal and not have headaches migraines do it okay I guess I will I thought it's a question you just keep talking structurally making sure everything's mechanically lined up you know starting with that foundation so making sure the spine is helpful to sit up properly the rib cage isn't collapsed it's open and allowing proper blood flow upon the rib cage you know looking at all those small little bones not only inside the mouth the palate it's the big reason the palates so important is you think of like you know blood has to come down and if there's any restrictions and like one side of the palates rocked up forward or rotated back because literally the palates not one solid bone it's almost like cut in half that's one of the big things like we didn't even get on the dental aspect and braces and all of that but a lot of times these dentists will actually have a bar and connect both sides of the palate together the upper palate and which is just one of the worst things that can be done to detoxing the brain and helping blood flow to agree and on the flip side sometimes palate expansion is really beneficial for people know yeah a hundred percent I had a patient the other day and she was saying she's coming in she's young she's coming it was a lot of neurological issues but it was maybe eight years ago she had her palate expanded for just dentally like they weren't doing it for her headaches or anything like that and she we were talking about it and her she looked at her mom she goes that was the that was one of the best things that I ever did that made me feel so much better when I when I had that done yeah so and I explained to them why and it was just improving the blood flow right so it's just making sure mechanically physically everything's you know lined up then next thing more structurally is still looking at all the neurological systems so making sure all the nerves in the brain all the cranial nerves everything's firing well so it's not creating stress we didn't go in depth about it but there's in this ferocity issues that can put a lot of stress on to the brain so it's like if the left side of the brain is working more than the right side of the brain that's gonna create more imbalances because you have to think about when the brain is firing it's gonna use a box chicken it's gonna use up nutrients and there's going to be more blood flow to that area so it's gonna cause a deficiency on the opposite side that's really not working because it doesn't need blood flow so that can cause a lot of issues just neurologically still affecting you know blood flow in the nerve firing components of it and then looking you know biochemical I wish we went really in-depth talking about the blood trigger big thing we didn't even talk about is just when we have high amounts of blood sugar it pretty much shrinks the brain and it doesn't shrink the brain like the melatonin shrinks it in a negative way which pretty much makes you more dumb because I try to be blunt try to be don't it right out there but it's like you we want a nice big healthy brain and when we're given this beautiful thing we don't take care of it when it's damaged it will actually decrease in size and then you're gonna have a lot of neurological issues from that as well well there are so many derivatives of sugar and high fructose corn syrup and it's becoming more and more processed and more and more foreign to the body but you know with what Nick is saying to is this is not necessarily about you guys figuring this out on your own you know unfortunately when it comes to physicians that are evaluating blood flow you know especially to the brain that is not necessarily happening often number one and number two is there's not a ton of tests that are available to really give us accurate information for our neurological health and you know I obviously know MRIs and CT scans exist but even when it comes to brain degeneration and you know myelin degeneration you have to actually have more of 70 per-- 70% or more degeneration in the brain before anything shows up on an MRI yeah it's like if you do make typical doctor when you evaluate this way would be a functional MRI that's gonna be the best in that world to really show you how the brains looking but yeah but there's still limitations with so much of the testing out there and when it comes to you know when we're looking at the body we're trying to look at all of these components to really weigh out you know is there a component that this person has a lot of issues with their glands do they have structural issues that are going on you know do they have blood flow issues because of abnormal blood sugar or do they actually have a heart condition that is either diagnosed or undiagnosed so you have to piece the puzzle together and you have to look at the body from an integrative standpoint because even today you know we're talking about migraines which is usually classified as a neurological issue or you go to our neurologist and then we're talking how cardiovascular effects it which is a cardiologist so and especially if you're going to a cardiologist and they're doing a stress test or they're doing you know some of their more common tests that might not come up abnormal to be reflective of you know abnormal blood flow in and out of the head or even like a high blood pressure in the head you're not always going to find that through those more traditional tests so fortunately we've worked really hard on trying to get our hands on some really advanced types of testing in our practice and we have the ability to evaluate all these different systems to get clarity on this and obviously to be able to give you solutions because when it comes to even the structural stuff that you're talking about Nick is you know you could maybe do some foam rolling and you can obviously work on your posture and try to stand more and sit less but sometimes you know you need a little bit of assistance with that especially for someone who has had like a really significant shoulder injury or an AC joint separation or they've had a neck fusion you know going in there and helping those people using technologies to break down the starch shoo or to you know detox out different infections that are creating these roadblocks these are all things that we work with in our practice to to lift that burden and to get things actually working more optimally a hundred percent it's like it's just structurally looking it's just like if you're trying to physically hold yourself up and good posture but it's it's fatiguing yourself it's because you're using your muscles instead of your skeleton system to hold you up you shouldn't really have to use much energy to have good posture yeah so that's the case then yeah you need some extra help to make sure your skeletal system can just hold itself there but then in the meantime really teaching and having proper exercises teacher muscles how to then have that you know neuroplasticity to hold yourself in that position yeah and even with the blood sugar conversation too is that I know so many people that come to me and they're like I've changed my diet I'm eating so much healthier like I don't understand you know why I'm not reaping the benefits of it and you know sometimes when it comes to the pancreas sometimes your pancreas is not regulating blood sugar because of you know the bad habits of not eating breakfast eating too much sugar in your diet but sometimes your pancreas is stressed because your pancreas is actually directly connected to your small intestine so if you've had a lot of small intestine issues we've had a lot of reflux indigestion heartburn you know you've had HP lorry infections whatever the case may be you could easily have a stressed pancreas that is actually due to infections so sometimes you need a little bit more help with healing the pancreas than just changing the diet overall but for those of you that have been listening and are just completely fascinated and I'm like oh my gosh I've been suffering for so long and I really want to get rid of my migraines you know check out our website integrative Wellness Group comm you can actually schedule a strategy call there to learn a little bit more about the process the testing and all that good stuff but I thank you guys for being with us and I will see you next week when we are talking all about vision and the brain