Breast Reduction for Migraine Relief
I've been receiving 15-20 trigger point injections with lidocaine every 2-3.weeks in my head, neck, shoulders, and back for around a year now. I've suffered from migraines for the last 20 years with them increasing in intensity and frequency. These injections are given into the knots in my head, neck, shoulders, and back. My doctor believes that my breasts are causing the knots which in turn cause some of my migraines. The trigger points do help for a few days. I'm on preventative and abortive migraine medications. Like many of you, I've been through tons of medication changes, Botox, chiropractic appts, seen different specialists and neurologists. I even went to Cleveland Clinic last week but was sent home with no new treatment other than to give Botox a try again and add supplements. I was wondering if anyone else has had the breast reduction surgery done and what was their results? My doctor doesn't think the surgery will rid me of the migraines but will decrease them. I would appreciate anyone else's thoughts.
Hi BAM197
I'm sorry you are having such a difficult time. I understand how frustrating it is to feel like you've tried everything to help reduce migraine frequency. Please don't lose hope, there ARE things that may help.
Have you by any chance kept a detailed migraine diary recently? A migraine diary is helpful to determine if there are any patterns to your attacks, what your pain levels are, what medications work and other things. Keeping a migraine diary is really easy to do with all the apps out there. Migraine.com has the Migraine Meter - https://migraine.com/blog/new-migraine-meter-app-available-on-itunes-and-google-play-for-android/ you may want to check out or if that doesn't work for you there are many more. To read more about keeping a migraine diary take a look at this article; https://migraine.com/blog/keeping-migraine-diary-basics/.
By any chance are you taking something on a daily basis or near daily to help ease your migraine pain? Even though we want the pain to go away, we can run into a problem called medication overuse headache (moh which was formerly called rebound). Moh can occur if we take migraine medications (Imitrex, Maxalt etc) and/or pain medication, whether they are over-the-counter or prescription, more than two to three days a week. If we have moh our migraine attacks will be more difficult to treat and we will end up in an endless cycle of pain that is also hard to break. In fact, I've been working with a patient who has moh and is just reducing her offending medication and is already feeling better. I've been down the moh road before and it really isn't pleasant. In fact I had moh from taking methadone for 3.5 years due to chronic pain. Let me share information on moh with you; https://migraine.com/blog/help-how-can-i-not-overuse-migraine-medications/.
There are many complementary therapies (in addition to traditional medicine) that can be used to help reduce migraine frequency - biofeedback, physical therapy,and acupuncture are just a few. PT may be something to look into to help with muscle tension. There are exercises we can do to help our muscles relax. Our complementary therapy section can be found here; https://migraine.com/complimentary-and-alternative-therapies/.I don't know anyone who has had breast reduction for migraine. This is an invasive permanent procedure that I'm not sure I would do until I exhausted all options and had a number of other opinions. I really do know how you feel, I've had them since I was a teen. I did find this very small study about breast reduction and migraine you may want to take a look at; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20048598.
Even though it feels like you've tried everything, please don't lose hope. There are over 100 medications that can be used to treat migraine! Kerrie has written a great article on this topic; https://migraine.com/blog/tried-them-all/.
I hope this helps, please let me know how you are doing,
Nancy
