I'm Blind! I'm Dying! I'm Having a Stroke!

If you have never experienced a migraine or any sort of headache, God bless you!  However, if you are the unlucky lot, you can relate to this crippling ailment.  I am sure you have tried almost everything for relief, and you get scared that this headache might be the one that will finish you off.  My first experience with headaches started when I was a teenager, and I thought I was going blind, dying, or having a stroke.  I found out later at the doctor's office that what I had been blessed with was a migraine with an aura.  I am not talking about the kind of aura around your body, but a sort of halo of lights that forms around things and causes a block in vision with a squiggly, silver colored line that can appear in one or both eyes in usually half of the vision.  This aura lasts about 30-45 minutes, and then the lovely headache creeps into the picture to plague you for sometimes an hour or can last a couple of days.  Sleep, a dark room, and a cold compress soon become your only hope.  There really is no rhyme or reason to it.  You can never predict when the headaches will happen or why they happen.  Anyway, I dealt with these headaches off and on for several years, and then I finally found a way to deal with them through getting chiropractic adjustments regularly.  If I do feel one coming on, I try to get adjusted immediately, and that will help keep the headache at bay.  

The one thing that I have always learned is that the #1 cause of headaches is dehydration.  So, the first thing you should do is increase your water intake to at least 8 glasses of water a day or drink half your body weight in ounces (ie. if you weigh 200 lbs, you would drink 100 oz.)  Therefore, not everyone should drink 8 glasses of water.  It really depends on your size.  This advice is recommended only to those who have healthy kidneys and are not being advised to limit your liquid intake.  Another tip to headaches is to avoid anything that is artificial or is a preservative.  One of the most common things you find in today's products is artificial sweeteners.  No matter what they tell you through marketing, anything that is man-made is hard for your body to break down and process.  Splenda, Nutrasweet, and saccharin contain chemicals that have been altered by man, and some people's bodies are super sensitive and cannot handle them.  Even if your body could handle it now, there is no guarantee that overusage will not create problems down the line.  The best alternative to sugar or artificial sweeteners is stevia, which is a root from South America.  It has no effect on blood sugar and has no calories, so diabetics and hypoglycemics can consume it usually.  I have hypoglycemia, so this has been an issue that I have had to deal with over the years.  I find the best form of stevia is the liquid, because it dissolves quickly into cold beverages.  Since I am from the South, I love my iced tea (sweetened with stevia).  :)

Other things to monitor are to look at the foods that you are most reactive to that can trigger a headache.  Some people are bothered by nuts, chocolate, caffeine, etc.  The key thing to do is to do an elimination diet to find out what really affects you.  In our office, we do a detoxification diet over a period of time to help you get rid of a lot of your symptoms that plague your body.  Stress also plays a huge part in causing headaches, especially when you strain your eyes when thinking a lot or you are in a constant state of looking down or looking at a computer.   New or old injuries that involve any jarring to the neck or head (ie. whiplash) can cause immediate neck pain or headaches or may develop over time if uncorrected.  Children are constantly having falls or spills just as part of growing up, but their bodies usually rebound very quickly.  This is why it is so important to get their spines checked regularly as well from a chiropractor, so that you may prevent any future problems.

I remember a patient who came into my office several years ago, and she was a referral from her aunt, who was a patient in my office.  Her aunt had expressed how concerned they were over her 8 year-old niece, because she had been having debilitating headaches for quite some time.  It wasn't until after going to her pediatrician and being prescribed heavy narcotics, that they showed up in my office.  Her father did not want his child on narcotics at such a young age.  I am sure most people would agree, or I would hope they would.  When she came in, I did an exam and found her neck to particularly tender to the touch on one side of her neck just below the skull.  The first bone in the spine under the skull is called the first cervical vertebra, also known as the atlas.  It is called atlas, because it holds up the skull/head, just like the old mythological figure Atlas who held up the world.  Anyway, here you will find an artery, a nerve, and a vein that exit on both sides of this bone which travel out to a large portion of the head.  If this bone is moved even 1 millimeter, it can put pressure on these structures and create pain in the form of headaches, or interfere with other processes in the body.  So, naturally, I took an x-ray of her cervical spine to see if this bone was misaligned.  Surely enough, it had moved laterally a couple of millimeters on the side where she had pain.  Therefore, I did a chiropractic adjustment to help guide that bone back into place to remove the pressure from those structures to help her body return to normal.  After three adjustments, she was completely fine and complained no more of headaches.  Thank God for her aunt and helping this young child get help, before she would grow up to be addicted to pain killers and who knows what else!

One thing is for sure, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!  The best gift you can give yourself is having your spine checked by a chiropractor for any misalignments.  Your body will thank you in the long run.