Seeing a Chiropractor for Migraines
Chiropractic Help for Migraines
Adults and Children Who Suffer form Migraines Can Benefit from Seeing a Chiropractor
Below is the chapter on Migraines, taken from Dr. Sean Woods’ book, “The Healing Vibe.”
A young girl, age 12, came into my practice because I was treating the mother and her daughter’s problem came up during one visit. The daughter had been suffering from migraine headaches for several years and was taking several medications to keep them from completely ruining her life. Without the medications these headaches would ‘take over’ and she would be in bed with severe headaches, nausea, and back aches. I told the mother that I thought I could help, and the mother was open for anything that could give her daughter relief.
I suffered myself with migraines and can still get one if I eat the wrong things. For me, it is things like soy sauce, food preservatives such as potassium sorbate, and sugar alcohols in diet products which are the triggers for me. Headaches, especially migraines, are always linked right back to the gallbladder and an upper neck and/or cranial subluxation. When we began care with the young girl, I located these problems immediately, and these were the reasons for her suffering. The first time I felt her upper neck and skull I literally almost cried, and I am not a crier. Her upper neck, the atlas/occiput area was very swollen, and I could barely touch it. The right side of her head was not any better. She had been living with this and was not able to express how much pain she was in all the time. I told her she had the right to complain and tell her parents how she felt. At the age of 11 she said that she just got used to it and was in some level of pain all the time.
Simple palpation of her stomach and gallbladder showed severe bloating and her lesser omentum (the mesentery between the stomach and gallbladder) was completely glued together. This is one of those cases we just talked about where this problem started in the womb and she had never had a properly functioning gallbladder. Talking over her history with the mother revealed years of ear infections, antibiotics, spitting up and colic as an infant, and stomach aches. The gallbladder meridian covers the sides of the body and especially the head. When a meridian gets as congested as hers, the simple consumption of any fat or toxin that caused the gallbladder to contract produced a headache. If she chose to eat a fried food, heavy fat meal, red dye number 40, food preservative, or any other neuro-toxin, then a severe migraine was inevitable.
She was one of those cases where we had to majorly decrease most food groups in order to get the digestive system moving in the right direction. All bread and dairy needed to be eliminated and we ended up eliminating all grains for a while as well. Getting a child to eat mostly fruits and vegetables can be hard to do, but that magic day comes when they have been feeling better and then they eat the wrong thing and they ‘feel’ the effects. I tell them my goal is not that they have to be strict for the rest of their lives, but long enough to get the body healthy so it can handle the ‘normal’ foods again without the backlash. The migraine medicine she had been taking had been helpful in preventing debilitating migraines, but you can see they are nowhere near the correction needed to heal the case.
The other extremely important factor to realize is that if left alone, the myriad of problems that this child would experience in her life would only escalate from here. During the course of care, I adjusted her 12-15 times and got her on simple supplements to thin bile and aid in the basic digestion of food. This is a case where just a change in diet and supplementation would NOT have provided the same results without specific chiropractic care. No matter what your belief system is or the understanding you have around chiropractic work, it is powerful and life changing when applied with care and expertise. If you are experiencing chronic health conditions, you will also have several vertebral subluxations that need to be corrected to regain great health. Open your mind, ask around for a good chiropractor, and add them to your quest for health.
On the first visit tell your chiropractor you are interested in balancing your sacrum and atlas, have them show you what they will do, and learn how to keep those two areas healthy.
After five months of care and her taking on greater responsibility for her food choices, my young patient is doing well. She is just weaning off her last medication as recommended from her medical doctor because she has been feeling so much better. She is not out of the woods yet but now she is in control of her situation and has released some of the fear and frustration with the ‘unknown cause’ of her migraines. This approach followed the same idea I use with everyone. When you take a step back and clean the basic systems of the body, the body will heal and fix itself.
As you can see, these case studies are not all complete success stories. I have hundreds of cases that I could write about that are, but I want you understand that health is always on a continuum. You can lose your health as fast as you gained it if you don’t understand the basics of living on planet earth.