Functional Medicine & Natural Healing Podcast
Functional Medicine & Natural Healing Podcast
Deciphering Migraines: From Triggers to Treatment
Ever wondered why migraines are more common in women? Ever wondered why certain foods trigger migraines? Ever struggled to find a solution that really gets to the root of the problem? We, Dr. Houston Anderson and Dr. Gabe, are here to answer these burning questions. Join our enlightening conversation about migraines, their triggers, treatments, and the significant role diet plays in their management. Let us explain why migraines are more than a mere headache— they are a neurologic condition impacting the trigeminal nerve in the brainstem, affected by genetics and a sensitive nervous system.
Within our discussion, we shed light on how TMJ and C1 alignment factor into migraines, and why it's important to address these issues. Hear us talk about the limitations of commonly used drugs and over-the-counter pain relievers and how they often overlook the core of the problem. We'll also delve into the importance of personal health history in determining the cause of migraines, and why tension headaches and migraines need different approaches.
Ideas for managing migraines through diet and supplements, identifying food triggers, and the importance of balancing sodium and potassium levels for cellular hydration are all on the table. We'll discuss in detail how iron deficiency, particularly in women with carbohydrate-dominant diets, influences migraines. You'll also get practical tips on supplements like artichoke extract and magnesium. As we wrap up, we'll focus on the significance of addressing the root causes of migraines for lasting relief. Make sure you join us next time as we answer your questions from Instagram in our Q&A session!
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Hey guys, welcome back to the podcast. I'm Dr Houston Anderson. I'm here with Dr Gabe. How are you today, doc? I'm doing good, man. How are you Good?
Speaker 1:I was thinking about recurring themes this week and in the office, and I think that one of the recurring themes that I was thinking about was, simply, I had at least like three phone consults. They're throughout the world, but there are people that have read my stuff, listened to a podcast, and then they call me on the phone. They pay $250 for 30 minutes. It's pretty expensive to talk on the phone and I always say like well, have you done the things that I recommended? And the answer is always no.
Speaker 1:And so I think, even before we start this podcast, like my theme for the week is like, hey, if you hear something from me or Dr Gabe, like we're not spitting out like possibilities or low probability information here, we're trying to throw out the best stuff. Yeah, there's always an exception to the rule, but if you haven't tried our basics yet, you know and I can't give you medical advice via podcast, but if you haven't tried our basics, make sure that you do those. Listen to the podcast, think about what we said that you haven't done, think about all the things you're doing that we say don't work, and then start reforming before you hop on the phone. We are always happy to talk, but if I'm just gonna tell you the same thing I told you on a podcast, you can save yourself a few bucks. How about you Doc any themes this week?
Speaker 2:No, I like that. You made me actually think about something. I know my patient population is a bit different from yours but, like how often one of the biggest struggles I'm running into is and, depending on the case, is how much I will push it. But I will send everyone paleo handouts. But a lot of people think you know you can just get away with not eating paleo, especially during the healing phase, because that's where I'm strictest and I will go. These are guidelines. This is how you should eat. For now.
Speaker 2:I want you to focus because I found gluten, focus on gluten, but keep this in mind. And then usually I become a little bit stricter and then it kind of depends on the case. Some cases, you know, if it's really dire, I'm like you better be on top of this and eating well. But yeah, I know that's been my little bit of a reoccurring theme lately is people who want to kind of continue having one foot in standard American diet and one not. And it's just kind of an interesting thing because, especially the amount of times we're dealing with insulin problems and that's where the crux of the issue is and it seems so simple because it is. It literally is simple and people are looking for something more complex, but when it comes down to it, you gotta eat more protein and stop eating so many cars.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I had a patient this week and I don't think she listens to the podcast but new patient and she's really sweet. But I took her off dairy and she has like a raw milk dairy like pickup service. She does for the community and makes everything raw cheese. And I was like, oh man, I'm so sorry, but no, the reality is, it's gonna be such a huge trigger for so many people, and that's what we'll talk about today when we get to the migraine stories.
Speaker 2:So why?
Speaker 1:don't you give me some migraine stats? What's going on here and maybe somewhere today at least like share your experience with migraines. Maybe we've covered it a little bit, but if I'm not wrong, we would call you a migraineur.
Speaker 2:I don't think we actually have. We talked about my dopamine issue last time, but yeah. So migraine stats one out of seven people in the world it's actually pretty high. Much more common in women and that's often due to many migraines or due to hormone imbalance, and so that's the reason why it's three times more prevalent in women. There is a little bit of a inheritance I inherited it or the predisposition from my mom. It's like a 50% chance that one parent has migraines. It's a 75% chance of two have migraines. That's both of them, and so, yeah, it's pretty bad. 2% of those cases will be chronic migraines, which means you're getting a migraine more than 15 days a month. That is where I fall. I fell into the chronic migraines To the point. Yeah, and let me just actually share that story since I'm on it.
Speaker 2:So in high school is when I started getting migraines. I remember my mom getting them beforehand. I mean, my friends would be like playing video games or something like. I remember one time or I playing one video game and we're just being absolutely noisy as can be and my mom's like screaming at us because I didn't understand how horrible they were and she was just like trying to lay in bed. She's sound sensitive, light sensitive, so she's having a rough time and she says stop it guys. And then I got my first one in high school, and typically they happen once or twice a month, some weirdly always on Sunday, and I don't know why, if I was just eating weirdly or whatever, but that was one thing I remember. It was always on Sunday. I get super nauseous and I had ended up throwing up, and usually throwing up would actually relieve it, but I remember that. But I also remembered I didn't know what to do about it. I had no medication that I thought would help. My mom used to use, I think, a rudus before it was off the market, but I had nothing that I knew would help. But I'd only get them once or twice a month. But as that progressed you know, missionary in Africa think I had them a few times there but by then I knew Excedrin would help and so I had a bottle of Excedrin. I didn't get them super common, I just can't remember. I don't think I ever wrote down how many times I had them.
Speaker 2:And then, as I got home and started going to school, nursing school and all that, they started to get worse and worse, to the point that I went to and this will kind of lead to the conventional approach a little bit. I went to a medical doctor on campus at Missouri State and he told me to take propranolol. I was hoping to get another medication called a tryptin, which is those things that will stop the migraine early on. But since Excedrin worked, he said, just keep using that. You may want to consider taking free a leave instead to see if that would help. Otherwise, he put me on propranolol.
Speaker 2:It took the migraines and at this time I was probably getting four or five a week down to twice a month, but I was only. I had a six month prescription of propranolol and if anyone knows what that is, that's a beta blocker. So technically it helps with blood pressure and they just found that it would help with migraines too, and that's likely because we're gonna get into why what migraines are doing in the brain. But that took them down to two months, but after six months they started coming back.
Speaker 2:My prescription ran out and I was tired of taking a propranolol prescription. I didn't want to be. I have a crutch. At first I kind of liked it, but then I was like I don't want a crutch for life. I want to be able to fix this, and so I went to chiropractic care.
Speaker 2:Somebody bought me two rounds of adjustments. It seemed to help, but I don't know what else was going on at that time either, because as soon as I went to chiropractic school, hoping, oh, regular adjustments, sweet. It made them worse. I remember and of course we're not the best adjusters in school starting off, but still I remember one time I got an adjustment, saw stars, which that's not actually a good sign. If you ever get an adjustment of your neck and you see stars, that's actually a really bad sign. Just burned a neuron, but anyways, it started a migraine, and it wasn't until we had that seminar with Dr Gangemi.
Speaker 2:All of us and he figured out migraines being caused by gluten, and that ends up being one of the main things you're looking for with migraines is a food trigger, A major food trigger, and we'll get into the triggers in a second. But that took away my migraines completely. I had other headaches on top of them, and so my life is riddled with several different types of headaches, but the migraines are gone. So that's how I solved my chronic migraines, due to Dr Gangemi. Shout out to him, but it is actually one of the top 10 disabling medical illnesses in the world. Like it is totally disabling if you actually had a migraine. We were just talking about how some people think they have a migraine and in reality they don't. And you can usually tell because they're talking to you. They are actually enjoying your presence. If you have a migraine, you're not enjoying anyone's presence. You wanna shut yourself off because it hurts that bad and you're nauseous, all these things. But yeah, that's pretty much, I think, the statistics as well as my story.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so if I go back to like kind of my podcast from a year ago on this, just a shout out to that so like I'm trying to take a different approach on this podcast from the one I took last time because, as I say, there's always like 10 different stories that tell you know the cause of something. So if you haven't listened to that podcast before, I do have my own MyRain podcast, but I did want to bring Dr Gabon here and talk to him about it. But I think that people all have different stories when it comes to migraines. So what we're going to talk about today are some of like the really basic things.
Speaker 1:So, just to go to some of the basic, a basic tenant that I would say is important to understand my migraines is they are neurologically based, right? So that's the one thing that sets a migraine apart from, say, a headache. They can still have the same triggers, but what you're running into is an overstimulated nervous system and not even specifically I don't like the word nervous system for migraines. Neurons, nerves, firing thresholds those kind of words are what I would use more to describe migraines and essentially the way your nerves work in your brain. Is you either you're all in or you're not firing at all, and what happens is you get too much into the firing and it gets a little bit complicated for your brain to figure out. It starts doing compensatory mechanisms for whatever the trigger was. And I don't even think we need to talk about too many triggers today, because I mean there's hundreds of triggers for migraine sufferers, you know, and that's just because they're at threshold.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're right at that threshold where anything will set them off, will fire a nerve. They're so even like if you go into neurology, it's like really fun. Like you could smell something, you could feel a vibration. Literally the vibration of your car could set off a migraine and then brushing your arm hair towards the direction that it lays is calming against it. So like your kid comes up and like so my kids do this all the time and they rub my hair the wrong way in my arms and it super frustrates me because it's irritating. Right, it's a nervous system irritation.
Speaker 1:Luckily I don't get migraines, but if I can convince them to rub me the other way, I'm like, oh, thank you, I love you too. Those are fun things. Like just those little irritants and yes, of course it's because like it's at the end of the day and I've had a good long day, so those are the things, but there anything can be a trigger. So I don't want to like say like, yeah, we'll talk about a few specifics as we go, just by happenstance. But I don't want to say like, oh, it's the lie, oh, it's this, oh, yours is unique because x, y or z, they're not as unique as you think. They're just nervous system stimulatory and and I hope that we didn't lose all our migraine listeners because of that because we can be very obsessed with like nobody understands my migraines.
Speaker 2:I think you're 100% right there and like I like that you started off with a neurologic thing, because so many people don't understand that it is not just a headache, it's a neurologic condition, because some people will get a migraine without the head and that's actually really important to notice. It's just for most people it's. It's affecting your trigeminal nerve in your brainstem. That's why it's so ridiculously painful. Your trigeminal nerve. It provides sensation to most of your face and your head up until, like you know, top of your head, back your head, that sort of thing. But it also descends down into your, the top of your, your neck, and so that in of itself is one of the reasons now your brain doesn't get has any pain receptors.
Speaker 2:You can poke your brain all you want, you won't feel it, but your blood vessels in your meninges do have pain receptors and that is what the trigeminal nerve is really going after and that's where we get into the all the migraine stuff. But one of the things I love about it is all these weird symptoms that you do get the yawning, the nausea, all those things is primarily due to the bleed over effect from the trigeminal nerve fire and so you get this bleed over effect where it's firing close to these other neurons and then those neurons start to fire. It's kind of that whole what wired together or what's what is it? What wires together fires together. That sort of thing from neuro neurology. Yeah, yeah, similar to that, but anyways, you get that bleed over affecting, you get these weird oras, you get all these weird symptoms and it's because of how this nerve complex is firing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think I just could you mention that way, the brain so much, and the spillover effect. A lot of people say that migraines are genetic, right, and there's definitely, like you said, hereditary migraines. But what essentially what you have is you have a brain wired similar to your parents that is capable of creating these sensations. Usually it means that you have a very sensitive nervous system, and that could be like you can expect that and almost anything. It could be that you're a stressed out person and so you're very detail oriented, like OCD almost. It could be that you're just brilliant, like really smart, but you'll notice that your brain might function just slightly different than other people's. It's similar to your family but maybe different. But it could be better or worse as far as that goes. But you'll find that essentially, yes, you're predisposed to having the capability to have a migraine.
Speaker 1:I often tell my patients you know I can't resonate with a lot of the brain stuff that they have, because that's like probably my strongest organ, not that I'm super smart, but that I don't. I don't get headaches. I mean maybe like five in my life that I can think of which I'm so lucky, right, and then I'm not prone to like depression Right, I'm just not prone to it. I mean, I've been here a while on this earth now and I just don't. I'm like, oh, it's a great day now once again.
Speaker 1:People hate me for that, I get it, but like if you had my gut issues that you had to wake up with every morning, then, like you know, I got my own issues too right. So more chronic fatigue that we have to deal with all the time. It's like we're chasing our own problems. But I would say like my brain or my head is just not wired to be overly sensitive to these kind of things. Maybe even some of the jaw issues or maybe my immune system strong. So, just because you mentioned it, that trigeminal vascular complex concept is simply like you do want to make sure that that C one is aligned. You do want to make sure that you don't have any TMJ issues that are constantly setting off that nerve and then, once again now anything sets off a migraine.
Speaker 2:I think that's an important thing. And then the last thing I want to mention, just because I'm always kind of concerned with this for people, because we're the root cause guys, we want to go after the root cause and sometimes I think in our arena we might forget the means to the end. We don't. I think me and you do a pretty good job to make sure that. You know people are trying to be as comfortable as possible. Give them some things in the meantime, as far as you can, heal and get over migraines. Sometimes it's not that quick for some people because there's layers that we got to go through, and so I always try to explain to them when you're getting a migraine.
Speaker 2:If it is a true migraine, it's vascular dilation, your blood vessels are opening up and so, as much as you know, caffeine can be a problem in people's lives. It absolutely is a problem. It is one of. If it works for you, it is one of the best things that you can do if you notice a migraine coming on, if you do not want to close yourself off from for two to 72 hours. So I usually will tell them, like, get some cough, like organic coffee or some like organic urbimate or something like that, and stave it off if you absolutely have to, because caffeine's effect in the brain is a vasoconstrictor and that's why it actually helps out of the ectodrine complex, and to me that's a whole lot better than taking.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you know, without going too far into the approaches yet, but I think you know one of the problems with X-Sedarin is it damages your gut. Now we're dealing with a damaged gut while we're trying to fix things Liver also, especially if you're going for like the acetaminophen kind of thing, maybe that works better for you sometimes. And even then you know I'll get into this on some of the root causes. But you know vasodilation in the brain essentially, but you can have vasoconstriction below the brain, below the brain, and so the vasoconstriction below makes you require a vasodilation above to compensate that you have enough blood flow to the brain. So obviously you don't have problems. So you have like both conditions going on at once.
Speaker 1:And it's why you don't see that straight vasodilators or vasoconstrictors other than caffeine that have 100% results all the time. And it's why caffeine doesn't work for everyone too, because sometimes you can't overcome other things but it's kind of complicated on that. But like your beta blocker, for example, is going to actually vasodilate in the systemic circulation, right, it's very confusing for people, I mean that's the same with caffeine too, because it technically is a vasodilator in your muscles.
Speaker 2:Correct, because it's trying to get the blood flow through, because it's fight or flight. You're adrenaline, it's time to go, yeah.
Speaker 1:And the last thing, on the just signs and symptoms a lot of people do suffer after their migraines for days, right, like you said, it can take a little bit of time to recover. At a minimum, like as a doc we're looking for, I always say I'm not looking for your migraines to go away. Today, though I want to say I don't know if I've ever had a migraine case that lasted more than six months, like literally most are like three months. Honestly, it kind of depends on who they are and where they are in their health, but three to six months is kind of the window where most people should be 80 to 90% better. I'm not even going to say 100%, just 89% percent, I think you're right.
Speaker 2:Especially with the hormone ones making up a good portion of them, that can take a little bit of time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, balancing the female hormones specifically. I think that's pretty common, but I think, if I can get your quote unquote migraine hangover to go down from 72 hours to 24 hours, or maybe it's just four hours, or maybe a 30 minute nap instead of a six hour nap is enough to make it go away. That's what I'm looking at. I'm looking at okay, what can we get down or can we get? You know, you've tried caffeine or coffee before and it wasn't enough to stave off the actual full migraine. You feel the prodrome coming, the auras you're seeing. But now we can even get the caffeine to work.
Speaker 1:Okay, great, now we gave you some quality of life to start, while we kind of dig deeper. And that's the biggest thing that when I find people that quit on their natural migraine treatment, it's because they're like, well, I tried and it didn't work, and it's like, well, you tried like one thing for one week, right, and that's not the way it works, because the nervous system is, like you said, right at threshold, right on edge, and we have to slowly but surely back that off. In addition, the more often you add migraines, the more you develop the neural pathways that fire more often. So, like you said, like the firing together, wiring together, firing together concept, it's like a road the more you drive on it, the more built in that road is, and so you actually end up in habits. You're having habitual migraines now, which are just completely different than the original one that you had, and we have work to do so let's talk about conventional.
Speaker 2:Welcome to my life. Welcome to my life.
Speaker 1:And I think this is a great condition for me to like explain to people like, look, I've never experienced like a migraine as far as I know it. You know I've had a headache or two, obviously, but like, and maybe a bad headache, maybe not even a bad headache ever, but I've never had a migraine. But like, if you listen enough to patients and if a patient can say things objectively, I can learn the stories right. I can, you know. I wasn't trained on migraines in any school class specifically. This is what patients have taught me over the years and I just listen and listen and we figure it out. And that's the cool thing, I would say a good doctor listens to you and figures it out with you. They don't have to be the smartest person that ever existed, they don't have to be, you know, the only migraine expert in the world. They just have to be someone to hear what you said, trust you and go with you. So I love that, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I love that too. And what you were saying there too, like, yeah, 100%, like if we had covered migraines in school, it was like so many even in the functional medicine world. I don't think that was ever touched on with our training. And then, in addition to that, the one thing that I remember that I loved the most was a book recommended to me. It's now outdated, I'm sure, but Oliver Sacks. He's a pretty famous neurologist out there and they made a movie about him because I think it's what Awakening or whatever. Robin Williams plays him, but he has a book called Migraine. It's for those who want to nerd up, because it's not for the layman by any means, but you will learn at least at that time the best research that we had on migraine, and it's pretty phenomenal. For I would say. Still, though, I think we've learned a little bit since then.
Speaker 1:Yeah, putting it together? I think yeah, after everyone listens to podcasts. I always say something that they don't agree with, or they, some other doctor said different. And they always ask me like well, you said this, I made a no. I'm going to ask you on our next visit what did you mean? And the reality is like there's a lot of research and I haven't read that book, but I'm sure when it's put together, that's what we want, right? My job as a doctor is not to teach you the PhD level you know information on neuroscience.
Speaker 2:My job is to say like how For the nerd person who wants to learn that, yeah, we're clinicians, we're not researchers, we're clinicians. We're going to look for the most effective, efficient way to help somebody Like I was talking to somebody the other day about herbs and just generally yeah, you could learn everything there is in the world, about every single herb in the world, but that doesn't tell you what is actually effective and efficient for treating a patient. You're going to read and say, well, this herb like I don't know Euro or something like that can do this, this and this is like, yeah, but so can this, and it's much more effective at it.
Speaker 1:Yep, I love that, I love that and that's I go crazy on that. With artichoke, you know that, just like there's a million different hormone stuff, but by far clinically, artichoke is like my winner, regardless of what the research says, and I know why, but like to explain it to everyone is complicated, so I just say trust me on this one.
Speaker 2:This herb works for hormones you know that's one I mainly use for hormones, unless I'm looking at a vitamin mineral issue because of like methylation or something like that.
Speaker 1:Doc, why don't you tell me about some of the things that you ran it so you got propanolol there. You go at the doctor's office the first time. You know what are some of the other things you've seen patients come in with as far as medications or conventional approach to treatment.
Speaker 2:So tryptons are pretty common. Imetrex is like the probably number one that somebody will be on, I think it's generic is like Sumitrypton or something like that. Those are the abortives if you catch them early. If you don't catch them early, they don't really do their job. There's injections. There's several injections now. There's emgality and a few others that people are using and it's like once a month injections. All kind of work similarly to propanolol, in that they're just trying to reduce the frequency and severity of it. That's usually their goal reduce frequency and severity.
Speaker 2:When I went to the doctor and that was 2008 or 2009 summer around there they still talked about food triggers. I don't really ever hear that being mentioned from any of my patients, like given a list of food, possible food triggers. It's not very common, like I remember them talking about chocolate and all these different things that could do it, but it's been a long time since I've heard anyone come in or state or even hear from others that aren't patients talking about the list of food triggers that are possible. Other than that, then it's your over the counter pain relievers and says that's usually what I hear and a couple of people come in saying that ibuprofen will knock it out and I'm like surprised because that never did anything to me. I'm like, really that actually helped. Okay, but that means then we could be looking at a fatty acid issue, as me and you well know. So yeah.
Speaker 1:So I mean I think yeah, even with ibuprofen. The question is, how often are you going to have to use that? Are you using that daily? Are you doing 1600 milligrams a day just to get by? I mean, eventually you run into a problem. Obviously, we know pushing it too hard and we run into leukotriene issues which are super painful and inflammatory, and then both you and I are working a lot harder on those because those are a pain in the butt to get down.
Speaker 2:So we can cause pain by themselves. And then you're like well, are you having a migraine or are you just having a leukotriene issue?
Speaker 1:Right, and they're super painful. So hence why we have pain management and stuff like that, because we over abuse a lot of things in our lives. So let's go through natural. Let's say someone comes into your office. What's the history part? What are you asking them?
Speaker 2:So usually if it's migraines is the thing that they put down on their intake forms. That's what they're coming in for. I'm going to be asking general history questions that we always ask, like what else is going on? Do you have any gut issues? All those things. But I want to differentiate the headache. Is it an actual migraine? Because some people will come in and I'm like that probably is more like attention headache, though there is decent amount of overlap there. I get attention headaches too. Like I do understand the overlap To the point that it's really difficult because you can get nausea with that. You can also get, in addition to nausea, you can get the sound sensitivity and stuff like that with a bad tension headache. But you want to differentiate that. Sometimes it'll be an actual cluster headache. That's a little bit different from a migraine. But we're going to probably from me and you. Our standpoint is like well, the root cause is relatively the same.
Speaker 1:It's just more random.
Speaker 2:It's just kind of more random with a cluster headache, and so I just I first want to differentiate that. I want to know if this is a true migraine, what's the history of it? Are you getting? Where's the headache located? Because sometimes it's like right here on your temples and they get a lot of pain there. There's not necessarily nausea and vomiting. Then I'm like well, you got TMJ problems, you're clenching your teeth or you're doing something. So that's the main thing. I want to be able to differentiate that because it'll be a different approach to a degree, like as muscle testers, as a pluriconegiatologist, there's only so far that we can really lead the testing before we realize something's not right we're going down the wrong avenue. However, that's usually my approach right off the bat is I want a good diet, history, personal health history, and then what type of headache are you having?
Speaker 1:I know, after I've been doing this for a few years. I always tell people honestly like I love muscle testing and it's like totally the best way to get treatment, in my opinion, obviously, but sometimes I pretty much feel like I can diagnose them while they're still sitting in their chair, right, you know they're like oh my gosh, they're all virtual. Yeah, you know, I get migraines every time I eat beef jerky. You know like, huh, that's weird. You know, like you know is it, is it okay?
Speaker 2:And it's organic yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, it could be that, or it could be literally just the chewing mechanism, right yeah, and then anything you know. So they just kind of give these clues and then you tease out, okay, is it the processed meats or is it the chewing mechanism? And you kind of figure that out. We test out those two things on the table and we're down to two options instead of 52 options for what's causing them. So that's what. That's what we're seeing the functional medicine doc, or the, or the well versed doc that knows migraines, that does muscle testing Some people call it frequency medicine slightly different, but kind of the same. Different ways to address a person, you know, assess them. You know, muscle testing to me is not energetic, but there are energetic forms of muscle testing.
Speaker 2:So yeah, Lots of ways to go through, yeah.
Speaker 1:So we prefer the R way, but it doesn't mean that the other ones don't work. It just takes a special practitioner and do each type of tech techniques. So you just got to know what you're going in for and make sure that you resonate with that practitioner, okay. So what else am I going to look at? So I don't. I think I found probably I mean I probably only had like two, 300 cases, I don't, I don't. That's a large gap, like I don't know 200, 250 cases of migraines in my practice over the years. But I would say probably. I can recall one, maybe two from a female of all those that were not hormone related. How about you, doc? Do you find a lot of females, not males? Yet we'll go to females only that have migraines that aren't hormone related.
Speaker 2:I mean, my male population size is small, like yours is right, yeah, but nevertheless, yeah, good portion of them are. I don't know if I have a number off the top of my head where it well, I know exactly if it's like estrogen dominance, hormone imbalance versus a cortisol trigger type thing, where it's like food or something related. I don't know if I have that percentage ever broken down. It's probably similar to yours, I'm sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I mean, so yeah, just for the females listening to the podcast, obviously, who, like you said, frequent our office a little bit more often than their husbands.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I mean we get male migraines, but I'll just kind of say this, like we'll get to this in a second but food triggers are more common, in males just, and they play a bigger role, whereas females can be like 50, 50, almost like what's again over generalization here, but like half food, half hormone kind of headache where if you only avoid the food, don't address the hormones, you're not gonna get better. And that would include, like you said, the stress hormones, things like that cortisol, progesterone levels, even serotonin levels. Look at serotonin, how much it plays a role in migraines and the abdominal migraines, yeah, and what I said before, where you're kind of predisposed to have a different brain, right, you have a different wiring, while you're sensitive to serotonin changes, right. So there's mood changes that are more prevalent in those with migraines, and then you have the migraines that trigger those mood changes, which make it even more complex, right, which I was wondering with if you had this overlap too.
Speaker 2:every once in a while I'll have an overlap where it's a hormone imbalance and they also have the food triggering of soy, because soy being the estrogen side of things, have you had that?
Speaker 1:Less commonly, less commonly.
Speaker 2:I also had a couple like that, and it's like immediate effect, but it's fascinating because they'll have the hormone migraines every period. And then soy was the trigger and it was just kind of interesting.
Speaker 1:That's super interesting. I wanna say like right now I don't think I have a single vegan in my office. As far as that goes, as far as patients go, but once again, consumption level of soy obviously would matter a lot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's what it was with this person. They weren't vegan or anything, but they were trying to be healthy. They just didn't realize soy was like so important.
Speaker 1:Not a superfood. And then I get a lot of women that say like, oh, I don't think it's hormone imbalance, because it happens other than my cycle. But we also do have to remember that there are hormone changes that occur with ovulation and I said this in a previous podcast. I'm seeing more women that have double hormone problems, meaning ovulation and menstruation issues like symptoms.
Speaker 1:Ever since COVID started, whatever that immune trigger was and it doesn't even matter if you were vaccinated or not, but specifically if you were exposed to it. So any kind of you just caught the coronavirus, the new SARS-CoV-2, you find that those people are starting to have more menstrual cycle symptoms. Now, of course, we've heard all the stories about fertility and stuff like that associated with the whole thing. I'm not getting into that. I'm just saying for migraine sources, you may be having a trigger midway through your cycle and that neurological trigger isn't like a one-time event. It could be a week from your menstrual cycle and a week from your ovulation timing, so like if you have two events that last a week long. I mean you're like half the month probabilities for females.
Speaker 2:So and it's consistent too. That's the other thing. It's often you know it's twice a month or once a month. You get a consistent time. You know what's coming.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay. So what else in the office? What else are you looking from the natural approach, anything you're looking for.
Speaker 2:Gut for sure Gut's gonna be a pretty big one to go kind of. In a more general sense, you wanna reduce that threshold, you wanna get them away from the threshold, and so that's just overall. You gotta get the gut under thing and, like you were saying with males, like yeah, of course, like food triggers are kind of a big thing, but I'm thinking we gotta make sure blood sugar's working right, we gotta make sure those cortisol levels like why are you stressed out? And then I think we have, like you know, like protein deficiency with the blood sugar issues, like that's a huge one. I just saw it again yesterday somebody eating a lot of carbs and probably protein deficient.
Speaker 2:Another one that was interesting because I was just testing and this wasn't migraine, but it was just an interesting connection and it made me think of it. She was testing for several different things that I'm like these are all on protein. I wonder if you're just straight up protein deficient. And that's what it was. It was just straight up protein deficient and it is way more common than people think it is.
Speaker 2:We do not have a steak like a meat and potato diet in America. We like to say that we have a potato diet with a very tiny side of meat, and so, in reality, it's like we're protein deficient and I can get on a soapbox all day about that because of these issues that we see on a day-to-day basis. And so all of this is gonna lead into what we like to describe as like the glass jar, what you can handle threshold-wise, and we're all like stressed out to the max and we're trying to remove you away from that threshold as quick as possible, but it might be multiple things that need to be looked at. So that's where I would be going, mainly because gut is so big and causing you to be at threshold. That's gonna be my first go-to. I wanna know that.
Speaker 2:What was the abdominal migraine issue Cause, it being the second brain, a lot of people have abdominal migraines and don't know it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I think we hit most of the major things. You know. Just, a lot of people are underestimating maybe, the way that cortisol, blood sugar, are correlated and how much that affects your liver, your ability to detoxify. So, you know, while I would guess I didn't even see any of these, but I would guess there's like 100 different books on, you know, migraines being the fact that you need to detox. You know, honest truth is that I think that's a slow way to go about it, I think, optimizing some of the other major systems, and I had a patient yesterday actually said like hey, you know, I noticed that you guys kind of go back to the same topics at the end of how to treat things. I go 100%.
Speaker 1:One of the coolest things about what Dr Gaben, I do is that we actually do keep it simple, right, you don't have to know every chemical that was ever made on earth and you know you don't have. I mean, you can go to a clean product and you don't have to like, say like, oh, but was it made with bad energy? And you know, are the people? You know they have an altruistic purpose where they're trying to save the world? No, they can. It can just be a better product and it's good enough in a lot of cases we don't have to go extreme, right? Can you drink RO water? This was the same person. Can you drink RO water without adding electrolytes? Sure, why not? Like you can do it, right, because everything else is balanced enough, you know. But yeah, our electrolytes? Cool, we'll talk about that in a second.
Speaker 1:Obviously, one of the old school remedies for migraines is adding salt. Here's the catch. It's all about cellular hydration and cellular balance as far as that goes. So if you have high extracellular hydration and low intracellular hydration, you're gonna be more prone to migraines. But how do you make that happen? You can't always make that happen overnight. It has to do with your sodium and potassium balance mostly. So a good example there is like if people are overreacting to chocolate, oftentimes it's not actually the tyromine which we used to think in the research. It's actually the fact that it's high potassium and it's pulling sodium out. So you'll see those changes in a lot of the potassium foods. So now you're the person that's taking seven multis, four different products and six different parasite cleanses and it's like how many of those have a sodium or potassium irritant? We'll say irritant because it can go either way, so I think that those are pretty important to start balancing.
Speaker 2:As far as electrolytes go, how much are we drinking caffeine, which is gonna be a diuretic as well, for?
Speaker 1:sure a general diuretic, so it's gonna pull it from the blood and from the cells, right. So now you're just dehydrated there. And how do you get rehydrated? Well, first you have to stop drinking the caffeine, One of the big signs. So I got this on my last podcast. I don't think I answered it because my mind wasn't thinking about it, but you'll find a lot of people that get migraines with weather changes. This is cellular hydration. This is sodium issues. This is balancing that out. So I think that that's an important one there, where you're seeing change in osmotic pressure or creating different things. So those can be a trigger. But think sodium, potassium, whether you need to add more sodium. And some people will say, like, take a bunch of sodium when you feel the prodrome coming on, the early stuff coming on, I'm like it can go either way. I can eat a migraine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it could make you worse or better, but you gotta figure yourself out that's a big thing there and I also like that you bring that sodium, because one of the other reasons that we need to be actually a little concerned, just in general, with sodium is like the low-fat diet. We've been a low-salt diet for how long, a long time, and people they're surprised when I tell them to add insult into their diet, like the research for longevity, for mortality reasons. It is. I think six grams a day is what they're saying. Six grams a day is actually better than you. It's a lot. It's better than two grams a day and it's surprising.
Speaker 2:Obviously, if your kidneys or something like that aren't working exactly right, you need more salt than you think you do. And sometimes we're surprised me and my wife when we go over someone's house they're like this is bland, like you need some salt on this sucker, like we salt our food, and I don't think a crazy amount. It's not like uber salty or anything, but one of the easiest ways to know if you have a salt issue and this I mean it's not foolproof but put some, like you know, a teaspoon of salt in a glass of water and tell me if you can taste it. If you can't taste it, you probably need it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it should be super salty if you're doing that Simple at home test. I like your at home test man. Okay, food triggers. I just want to talk about the neurotoxins. Like, absolutely 100%.
Speaker 1:Like if someone comes in and says they're still doing these and they have migraines or headaches or ADD or ADHD or any brain issue and they've got aspartame, msg, food dyes or processed meats in their diet, I'm like you missed the whole boat, because that's where the research lies a lot, that's where it agrees 100%. No one's saying that aspartame doesn't cause brain stuff, right? Everyone is saying it does. I saw a little I don't know picture the other day. Once again, msgs. Everyone thinks they don't get MSGs, but of course I still have my patients and I love them to death. But like then I go to Chick-fil-A in St MacDonald so it's healthier, but the chicken and the breading has MSG in it, right? So what's your Pleasure to serve you, pleasure to serve you MSGs. We need to make that commercial. I mean, it's pretty blessed, right? So yeah, so you know, saving the cows, the only other one that I didn't mention, that we had written down iron deficiency.
Speaker 1:So a lot of the females, once again the women more prone to migraines than men, but can happen to men too. In our carbohydrate dominant diets is iron deficiency decreases the oxygen to the brain. So what happens? When your brain doesn't have oxygen, it has to vasodilate, one of those main triggers for migraines. So women are coming in often saying like, well, I only eat white meats, right, I'm eating chicken and tuna. And you know they won't eat the red meat because either it doesn't sit right or they feel like it's less healthy and they're running out of iron. I mean, how many women I can tell you that have a history of anemia? In my office they tell me that Well, I'm not anemic now, but I used to be. And it's like probably that's a solid in my office. 50% of my women either have it now or have a history of someone telling they were anemic at some time.
Speaker 2:And there's probably a good 50% that are eating exactly the way you're talking about too. I think it might be more than 50% that are coming in not eating red meat. Like I love it. Whenever I finally have a woman come in that is eating red meat, I'm like hallelujah, please eat that way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you find that those people end up being more robust. I always say red meat is the best for stress. Red meat is the best for physical stress, mental stress, emotional stress, like any kind of stress you have, rebuilding the body. Red meat is so critical. If life is perfect and your health is perfect, we could probably cut back on some red meat. I always say but, generally speaking, the lives we live in 2023, 2024 coming up here soon, we need a lot of red meat to exist. So what else diet goes, doc? What other recommendations for migraines specifically, I mean?
Speaker 2:I think you hit some of the main ones that I have seen and struggled with personally. The process means we'll do it. So like things like look for nitrates. Anything like that actually has nitrates in it. That actually can be a trigger. The food dies.
Speaker 2:If you don't recognize something on an ingredient list, you should be wary of it. Msg like that can be hidden to a certain degree and I would say even be aware of the celery powders. Not everyone is affected by that and I can handle like, let's say, like one of those chomps, grass, bed sticks and those things. I can be probably one or two in a day, but if I eat three or four I'm not gonna feel very good the next day. Is this just too much of the extra things? Even though it's, you know, natural, they're adding in celery powder or whatever. I can't handle too much of that. Msg is almost always like, depending on the degree that it's in there, it will mess me up pretty quick and like I actually had an experience not too long ago, I haven't had a migraine a long, stinking time, but we went over to a friend's house and it was in something that they put in there and they're usually pretty good about what they're putting in their food, but it was in something and, sure enough, the next day migraine hit. I was like, wow, I forgot how horrible this is. And so that's the main ones. Anything that is processed and is excitatory, I think we hit most of them to the degree that I would be concerned with.
Speaker 2:Outside of that, it's just eating a healthy, good diet, getting your protein in, getting your fruit and vegetables, and also just be aware that it may not be a trigger, or at least it might be a slow trigger would say that Eating a bunch of legumes, eating a bunch of carbs and stuff like that can affect you negatively. As good as they are, as much as you enjoy hummus or whatever, if you're doing that on a day-to-day basis, it may not be beneficial to you. And then the last thing processed seed oils, those things. So if you got a fatty acid imbalance, you're eating a bunch of grains and then you're even if they're organic, non-gmo, and then they're fried in canola oil or sunflower oil or safflower oil, expect to not feel very good. And if you already have a fatty acid imbalance and you're prone to leukotriene issues or prostaglandin problems, expect to not feel very good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the big words. For those new to those terms, I think those are all basic inflammatory conditions that you can have, but essentially a lot of them are caused by junky oils. Right, and that would be every French fry, I don't care what oil they use for it. Right, that would be-. A duck fat. Yeah, duck fat's not a junky oil, that's an animal based oil.
Speaker 2:And you don't ever find that one, but when you do, man, it's like candy.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I mean, I still tell everyone my favorite way to eat kale is in duck fat, right.
Speaker 2:Oh gosh yeah.
Speaker 1:That's tasty. The only other thing that I was saying. So I just once again, because the theme this week was nobody listens to me. No, not that they don't listen, but they're not understanding what I'm saying. Like, if you think you're gonna eliminate migraines and not eliminate most of those processed foods, like 99% of them, you're not gonna get too far. The cleaner, more at home you can make food, the better it's gonna be. The other one that I thought of that catch a few of my patients that are eating pretty clean is like steak seasonings. So they're out there grilling and making food, but they're just buying run of the mill. They ran to the supermarket. They're all steak seasoning or whatever it is yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Those all have some kind of MSG or processed kind of chemical that's gonna set off a migraine. So yeah, you can make those pretty simply at home. You just have to plan ahead, or that's what mostly. I'm just gonna salt and pepper my stuff, but you can add your own chili and cumin and all that stuff and make your own stuff. But, just paying attention, that's one that I'm just thinking about grilling this afternoon. So I've got to be careful for those.
Speaker 1:Going back to treatments, I feel like we've been a little bit I've been lazy about giving you guys more supplements to try. I feel like people like to try supplements and I like to try supplements. So if I had a second job, it would be just like trying every supplement on earth and then documenting the changes. We'll get there one day. But so artichoke for females. If you haven't done artichoke for once again, I said three to six months. So if you haven't tried artichoke extracts, obviously my brand's AMG Naturals. But AMG Naturals artichoke extract for about three months for a migraine, and you're a female, you probably should Because, like I said, it's most of my female patients with chronic migraines and sometimes you can. I mean, obviously if you're the woman that can track it to your cycle 100%. That would make sense.
Speaker 2:Magnesium side trait obviously is a neurological relaxer, so that's an important one we talked about I need to be talking about some of the other magnesiums too is I would throw out there too, because maybe citrate you end up being prone to diarrhea or something like that if you take too much. So because the research shows, especially if it's gonna be affected with migraines, sometimes you have to get up to like 700 milligrams, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know people are recommending like a thousand milligrams acutely, but yeah, my gut wouldn't tolerate that. But you know, even magnesium is one of those where, honestly, like if you take it prophylactically every day, that's one of the few I don't have a problem with. You know a little bit of magnesium here and there. But yeah, like my second favorite probably form a magnesium for migraines would be three and eight. That's probably my second overall.
Speaker 2:Specifically for the brain, because your brain loves three and eight, so like that's a good one, glycinate would be another one I would throw out there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so when they're listening yeah, on the glycinate, I'll just throw out that. I see both right. I see glycinate cura migraine and cause of migraine.
Speaker 1:So just know who you are know who you are and you know, if you're someone listening to this podcast right now and you're taking a maglycinate and getting migraines, consider switching to one of the others, because you're still having migraines and you're taking the glycinate form. So try the three and eight form. Just once again, lots of different options there. There's way more forms of magnesium, but those are probably my three favorite right there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that works really well and you can even try, like I think, biotics they have, like the one that I use, mgzyme. It will have three different ones in it, so you get, like Malate, one of the other ones. So that could be helpful too, having a mixture. You just want to try, like you were saying, just try them out. I like mag Malate. Yeah, b2 is not one that I have tried, but I know a lot of people say that riboslavin can help. But yeah, like we've talked about, you have to be careful. It can jack up your gut if you're taking riboslavin and a lot of people just take it and not really thinking about it and it can actually contribute to some gut issues if you're not careful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, as I mentioned electrolytes, I'm gonna link one in the show notes, but there's one called Quintonic or Quintin electrolytes. They have an iso isotonic and a hyper tonic. The hyper tonic can be good, like if you're in a prodrome and you actually respond to Sodium. You can drink that really quick, easy to get some salt in that way. It's just pretty much a sea salt like actually For this scenario.
Speaker 1:Yes, it's too expensive for me to use on a daily basis, to be honest. So you know I might use it for someone. I'll use it for a pot syndrome. So, like dysautonomia, will use it for that acutely because I'm trying to get like the absolute most effective one without cost, care, care right, like I, whatever it cost, because a thousand dollars we're gonna get you better today. You know that's that case and most people I'm gonna do like I'll use sell salt sometimes. So like tissue salts, homeopathic tissue salts, I'll use that one and then I'll also just do like a. You can buy the really cheap sodium potassium ones on full script. I'll link to that too. I'll usually do something more like that, a buffered one like. So I actually like a pH neutral, magnesium, sodium, potassium kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I like to look at some of those on time. I've used element and I've used real meat element. Okay, but you have to be careful. You can't drink it super quick because I mean, it's gonna, you know, feel very good. Your stomach hurts high. So, yeah, yeah, cuz, yeah, the salt content. Right now I'm using relight with and uses red mints, but it has a couple extra things in it and I think that one doesn't sit well with me either. I just like that was like in a nice little bottle and it was relatively inexpensive, but right now I don't think it actually sits well.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I'm always looking for other ones. Yeah, we, you, we've used relight before and at home and we haven't had a problem with it, once again, not specifically addressing migraines or, you know, neurological sensitivity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just just a basic one there, and you know it is on. That is one of my manufacturers. The same manufacturer manufacturers relight actually makes artichoke. So I do know their integrity and quality of like manufacturing. Though, once again, my requirements for no fillers, no binders, high quality herbs is different from I don't know what relight requires. I'm not gonna say anything there, but I just know that you know that's. That's one of the same factories that's gonna be able to do a clean product if they choose, you know, but yeah, so too.
Speaker 2:So like I actually like that brand for salt.
Speaker 1:So Yep, I like red bins. I you know you can do your Himalayan sea salt, but I always, yeah, I add red bins with it. I all trade my salts. Actually is what I do at home. So biotics research has.
Speaker 2:I was gonna say real quick, you can also just drink pickle juice.
Speaker 1:So I love pickle juice. I don't mind drinking it, it's it really energizes me when I need sodium. So I'll do that really quick because I almost always have pickles, because my kids love pickles, but I'll just drink the juice. I don't even like pickles that much.
Speaker 2:This is the the bubby's pickles. Have you had those? Yes, they're amazing.
Speaker 1:There's, there's your brand, if you want a good brand, that's, that's holistic, healthy. A Few migraines I'll see, you know, just throwing out a last supplement here. A few migraines I'll see, based upon previous concussion and and technically I wouldn't even diagnose them as true migraines, but they're presenting as such, you know, half the face severe disabling, slurring of speech, loss of function. They're kind of migraine like, but they're really more just the neurological component rather than the pain, and, and so I found that olive leaf is that great antioxidant for that.
Speaker 2:I have. I have not messed up.
Speaker 1:So it can help with the xanthine. Correct, that's, that's how. So just a clinical note there. Yeah, so for xanthine, which is like vaccine, injuries and Any head trauma, I've always found a really good success with olive leaf. But I would be Interested in doing like high-dose OPCs or something like that. I haven't messed around with that. They're a little bit more expensive so I just haven't like given someone a whole bottle a day, but I would guess that those would help with like kind of the previous head trauma, I think football player or you know. Once again, going back to males, not so Hormone maybe, not even that much food, you know, can truly be a structural imbalance contributing to the whole story.
Speaker 2:So that's all I got doc.
Speaker 1:What else? Do you have anything else you want to say on migraines before we end?
Speaker 2:The only other thing, the other supplement that's popular out there. I don't do you ever see fever a few actually being effective?
Speaker 1:I've never seen it, yeah from everything I've tried, I've had a couple people do go to fever, few and butter burr, but I didn't prescribe them they and they were slow. Their slowest can be like 45, you know, 45 days in they start to see a decrease in migraines. But my, my take, symptom relief is what they are their Inflammation or stimulatory relief, not a root cause. But once again, looking for some relief while you go for your root causes can't get in with me or dr Gabe anytime soon. Well then, you're gonna have to figure out what you can. You know I like those.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there.
Speaker 1:I'm sure there's other herbs out there. Um, you know, I feel like the root cause approach works pretty well. So I I haven't had to search for, like this magical migraine cure, because I feel like when we address the major things your foods, your environment, your infections and your hormones, like I feel like everyone gets pretty much better from migraines, keeping them at zero. That can be a journey because you got to keep your life perfect.
Speaker 2:But, like I just said, having a migraine not too long ago, like I usually don't get them, but you can make a mistake exactly.
Speaker 1:All right, so that's it for this podcast. Listen to the next one, guys, we're gonna do the Q&A that we got submitted from Instagram. Once again, you can follow both of us on Instagram and we will see you on the Q&A podcast. We'll see you later, doc. All right.
Speaker 2:Yeah.