How to eliminate migraines and headaches in less than a week

Hi, this is Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome back. Migraines are severe, nearly disabling headaches and they can occur from once a year to up to three to four times a week and can last from a few hours to a day or days. creating suffering for people that is really, really bad. And this occurs with millions and millions of Americans. And they're often associated with an aura, light sensitivity, nausea, vomiting, severe throbbing pain on one side of the head or both, and it can also be associated with stroke-like symptoms or paralysis. And the cost to our society is enormous. Migraines add about $13 to $17 billion do our health care costs? And these are from direct medical care things like medications, emergency department visits, hospitalization, physician services, lab tests, and even managing the side effects of treatment. And other indirect costs result from lost productivity in the workplace. So these are really severe problems in our society. Headache, in fact, is the most common complaint reported by patients visiting the emergency department, accounting for almost 3 million visits. in 2000 and costing over $2 billion. Headaches are mostly migraines. It's the top reason that people see neurologists. It's the most frequent pain-related complaint among workers. And one study that focused particularly on migraines found that the annual cost to employers exceeded $14.5 billion, of which $8 billion was due to absenteeism and about $5.5 billion due to reduced productivity. so this is a huge problem both to those who suffer and to society as a whole. Now, migraines are very hard to treat and very difficult to prevent with conventional approaches. There's a whole host of preventive drugs, right? Calcium channel blockers, beta blockers, anti-seizure medications, antidepressants and more. And none of them work well. Some of them don't work at all. And they're often accompanied by very severe side effects. And some doctors actually are now using Botox to paralyze the neck muscles to relieve headaches. Thankfully for some, there's a new class of medication called triptans, things like Imitrex, Maxalt, and Zomig that can stop a migraine once it starts. But these have made migraine sufferers handle attacks better, but they also have serious side effects and are very expensive, costing about $1.2 billion a year. Now other treatments can lead to addiction, independence, things like narcotics which are not great. So all this doesn't paint a very pretty picture. And for none of those treatments do we find great effectiveness. And some of them don't work at all. So the problem here is the same one we see so often in medicine. We treat the symptoms, not the causes. We deal only with the effects of something and not the underlying seven keys to ultra wellness. In fact, using a functional medicine ultra wellness approach, I've been able to get nearly 100% of my patients migraine free within days to weeks. Now, many of my patients are doctors and they're often at the end of the rope. And one I want to tell you about was a physician from the Mayo Clinic, the mecca of conventional medicine. Now, this woman had severe disabling migraines and she was barely able to function at work. She depended on oxycodone, which is a strong morpheine-like narcotic, and Zofran, which is a powerful anti-nausea drug used for chemotherapy patients. She had seen every specialist at the Mayo Clinic and had traveled far and wide to other top neurology headache centers like the Diamond Clinic, but never found relief. Everybody focused on her headaches and not her other symptoms, which held all the clues to her problem. Migraine is no different from any other disease. It's simply the name we call a set of symptoms that are common in a group of people. The name tells us nothing about the causes of the symptoms, which could be very different depending on the person who's having the headaches. In fact, migraine headaches, you know, and migraine headaches are maybe up to 20 different causes. So my job is to be the medical detective, to find the cause, not to give powerful symptom suppressive drugs, although I'm not against treating symptoms when they're there. I remember very well working in the emergency room, treating all the migraine patients with intravenous narcotics and nausea medication. I felt bad for them. And I felt worse that I didn't have a way to prevent them from coming back. Now I do. So what happened to this doctor who suffered migraines nearly every day for years with no relief? Well, I saw her and I asked a lot of questions. And she had many other symptoms, you know, palpitations, severe constipation, once a week. anxiety, insomnia, muscle cramps, menstrual cramps, and all this in addition to her migraines. Now all of these symptoms are connected. In fact, they told me that her whole system was tight and irritable and crampy. And that usually means severe magnesium deficiency. And that often occurs in our society because of poor diet, caffeine, sugar, alcohol, and stress. So I put her on high dose of magnesium, we cleaned up her diet, and within a couple of days, she was migraine free and never had another migraine. Now another patient had disabling migraines for 45 years and she couldn't have a social life or plan anything. She spent most of her time in bed with the lights out. She had an allergy to eggs. No eggs, no migraines, except when she felt so good after three months she decided to have an egg and she ended up in the hospital with a three-day migraine. Now another patient had migraines always before a period with severe PMS and she had bloating, sugar cravings, breast tenderness, irritability, all those symptoms of PMS. And that's related to hormone imbalances that occur with too much estrogen and too little progesterone. Now getting her hormones back in balance relieved her migraines. I yet had another patient who had a genetic problem with their energy metabolism and mitochondria and they need a high dose of vitamin B2 and CoQ10 to get relief. And another patient recently I saw, she had a lot of bloating which she had after eating. and that told me she had a bacteria growing in her small bowel, which she shouldn't have. She also had food allergies, and we dealt with those, which took care of her regular daily headaches, but her migraines kept going on, and it was a problem. So then we cleared out her bacteria in her small bowel. It was actually just treating her irritable bowel, and guess what? Her migraines went away. So there was something toxic in her gut that was causing her to have migraines. So one patient, another patient actually lived on Diet Coke, and she didn't care rid of her migraines until she gave up aspartame. And yet another patient had low blood sugar that triggered the migraine. So eating small frequent whole food meals stopped the headaches. And lastly, in one patient, she always got headaches when she exercised in the heat or with dehydration. So you can see that even though they may all have the same symptoms, right, migraine, the treatment must be different. Now the system of ultra wellness helps us understand how to relate different symptoms and how to understand how they're connected. So getting the full story is so important. Here I'm going to just review briefly for you the most important causes, their associated symptoms and the tests you can use to identify problems. The first is food allergy. So food allergy is often associated with gut problems and you can have other symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, bloating, irritable bowel, postnasal drip, so forth. You can check food allergy testing and gluten testing. And wheat is a big problem. You can look at stool and urine testing for gut function. But the treatment is actually pretty simple. It's simply eliminating the most common food allergens, gluten, dairy, eggs, and yeast. So a good way to start. You can also add corn to that because that can be a common allergen. And getting the gut healthy is important. So then there's chemical triggers. And that's often clear from the history, right? If your diet is full of aspartame and MSG and nitrates from deli meats and sulfites that are found in wine and dried fruit and salad bars, you can get migraines. So get rid of the processed food and additives and eat a whole foods unprocessed, phytonutrient-rich diet. And then if you have hormone imbalances, that's another cause. And that can be clear from the history of PMS, the use of the pill, even hormone replacement therapy. And there's some blood tests you can use or saliva tests for hormone levels looking at imbalances. And the treatment again is very simple. Eat a whole foods diet which has a low glycemic load, low doesn't raise your blood sugar, has lots of phytonutrients, has flax and soy foods and cruciferous vegetables. You can use certain herbs like Vitex and magnesium and B6. And you can also avoid alcohol, caffeine, sugar and refined carbs, do a little exercise and stress reduction and that'll help the hormone imbalances. And lastly, magnesium deficiency, right? We talked about that. So anything that's tight or crampy in the story, you know, headaches, constipation, anxiety, insomnia, irritability, if you're sensitive to loud noises, if you have muscle cramps, palpitations, those are a clue that you're magnesium deficient. Now you can check your red blood cell magnesium level, but even this can be normal if you're really deficient on a perfect test. So the treatment is really just trying magnesium and seeing what happens. And then of course, lastly, there's the mitochondria, which are the energy production factories, and the symptoms there can be fatigue or muscle aching, but Sometimes they're very subtle and you can check a urine test called urine organic acids that can help you look at the function of the mitochondria. But the treatment is again pretty easy. Use some vitamin B2, some CoQ10, and some other things. So just remember that sometimes a combination of treatments is necessary and you can use other things sometimes. Herbs and homeopathy, acupuncture, osteopathic treatments. But the bottom line, the bottom line, is that this problem affects one in five Americans. across society $17 billion a year, and is almost entirely preventable by following the principles of functional medicine and ultra wellness.