What is a migraine headache?
They use to think that migraine headaches were a completely different kind of headache than a regular tension headache. Migraine headaches are actually classified the same as a tension headache, they are just more severe, and as the severity gets worse, the neurological symptoms that you classically associate with migraines appear.
The typical "classic" migraine headache looks like this:
- Throbbing sensation throughout the head, and perhaps only on one side.
- There's a prodrome. A prodrome or "aura" is a symptom that comes along before the headache starts. It could be a strange smell, an weird sound, lightning bolts flying across your field of vision, or a generalized sleepiness.
- There could be visceral symptoms.
- Aspirin does not help relieve migraine headaches.
- Migraine headaches wake you up at night.
- Certain foods will trigger a migraine headache.
- Alcohol will trigger a migraine headache.
What's this prodrome aura?
There is an aura that people experience as a prodrome. Let me explain. An aura is a sensation that you experience that you aren't supposed to feel. It could be a strange taste, a funny smell, ringing in the ears, a dizzy sensation or a stomach ache. The most common aura is visual sensations like lightning bolts shooting across your field of vision. An aura is usually pain free, but it comes right before your migraine headache. When it does this, they call it a "prodrome." A prodrome comes before the migraine attack. This is usually how experienced migraine sufferers know that they are out for a few hours.
How does it work?
They've looked into this throbbing pain in the cranial vessels before. You don't actually feel the pain in the brain itself, but it's the blood vessels that wrap around your brain where you feel the actual pain. When there is a reflex imbalance of the nerves that control the tone of the blood vessels around your brain, your blood vessels will tighten down and squeeze off the supply of blood rushing through. This squeeze on the blood vessels will actually starve parts of your brain, and that will cause your aura. With the right medical imaging equipment, you can functionally watch the "ischemia" of the starved parts of the brain as it migrates across the surface of the cortex. It travels at about 1 cm per second from one part of the brain to the next. This is the reason why your visual aura goes at a certain rate from one part of your visual field to the next. You are actively seeing oxygen starved parts of your occipital lobe in your brain make funny shapes in your vision.
As the blood vessels constrict with the serotonin secreted from the nerve endings controlling the blood vessels, they tighten down and starve themselves too. They get fatigued. They've reached the limits of their metabolic capacity. They give up. They dilate. The dilation in the blood vessels lets more fresh blood in, and gives the blood vessel muscles a chance to recharge, and they start to constrict again.
And as the blood vessels are dilated, they let out parts of the blood into the space outside of the blood vessel. Some of these blood contents are inflammatory and they cause pain. This gives you the pain from the headache. And as you have inflammation all around the blood vessels around your brain, you become sensitive to pressure and you feel every pulse from your beating heart as the blood rushes through the vessels.
The imbalance that comes from the nerves coming from your brain-stem to the blood vessels is sensitive to other neurological inputs from throughout your body. This includes very powerful nerve pathways from your upper spine to your brain-stem. The quality and rate of the nerve signals can greatly influence the serotonin output from your brain-stem. If your neck is tight on one side, but not so tight on the other side, you can have an imbalance that can upset this mechanism of migraine headaches.
Chiropractic care and your migraines
Chiropractic care is the best way I can think of to balance out and relax the stress on the upper neck. When you get your upper neck adjusted, it relaxes the tight muscles in your upper neck, and this allows the nerves in your brain-stem to relax and not cause havoc in the vessels around your brain.
When people start chiropractic care for their migraines, they usually notice three things:
- People under chiropractic care have fewer episodes of migraine headaches.
- People under chiropractic care have a shorter duration of migraine headache episodes.
- However, when under chiropractic care, when you do get a migraine headache, the intensity tends to be just as severe. (They just won't last as long and you don't get them as often.)
We see this in our chiropractic clinic in Salt Lake City too. When people come in with migraine headaches and I examine their neck and I find muscular imbalances from underlying problems in the joints, I smile because I'm confident I can help this patient. It's actually getting to be pretty predictable.
There are several techniques that I use to adjust the subluxations in your upper neck. A subluxation is a chiropractic term for functional joint dysfunction. Subluxations cause nerve imbalances. Chiropractic adjustments reduce subluxations, and allow the body to function properly. Before your adjustment I feel tight muscles and you can't move your neck as well as you should. After your adjustment, your muscles are relaxed and everything moves better, and feels better.
I encourage anyone with migraine headaches to get under a regular course of chiropractic care. The time and costs involved with traveling to your local chiropractic office is well worth your being able to function properly at work and at home.
Dr. Todd Lloyd
Chiropractic physician
