This has helped. Science behind it according to book...
I am the mother of a 16 year old girl who developed daily chronic migraine last spring. They started probably 6-9 months prior as milder and intermittent (1-2 per week for few hours). The severity, duration and frequency all increased in lock-step with brand new and expanding food allergies, which gave her an itchy mouth only at first, and then later hives. Birch pollen allergy cross reactant foods according to allergist. All tree fruits, almonds, cilantro, kiwi, amongst other items. We wound up with epi pen.
Back to headaches...neurologist prescribed Elavil, 25MG. That did control most of headaches, occasional break through events of milder pain. She didn't like the Elavil. Very modest weight gain, but more the inability to take it off regardless of diet or exercise.
We did various food elimination trials. Eliminated gluten, this improved things, but not perfect. We are uncertain about eggs, sometimes seems trigger sometimes not.
But here is what we think did help...Coconut Oil. I read book called Migraine Miracle, by neurologist who is also migraineur. He discussed research on ketogenic diet and it's impact on kids with epilepsy, which is also disorder with "hyper-sensitive" brain. My daughter does basically eat paleo, minus eggs (mostly), no sugar, no grains. But adding the coconut oil made a difference. The book says that you need to get to very low carb to get your body into ketosis, to generate the ketones which they know cross the blood-brain barrier and seem to soothe the brain. BUT you can get your body to generate ketones, without getting and staying completely in a ketogenic state. Your liver metabolizes medium chain fatty acids into ketones, period. always. Coconut oil excellent source of MCFA (or MCT they say sometimes). Not so for EFA's like fish oil, which is still good for you to reduce inflammation in general in the body.
She also takes 100MG of ubiquinol form of Co-Q10, morning and night. Also 400MG of Riboflavin, a highly bioavailable form obtainable from seeking health, and the naturalpath doc who does all the work on MTFHR genes. And 400mg of magnesium 2x a day. And coconut oil. We were doing a smoothy as recommended in the book, 1 cup of full fat coconut milk (look for organic and without guar gum stabilizer/Amazon), 1/2 banana, scoop your favorite protein powder, some ice. And also you can buy "Bulletproof MCT oil", which contains coconut oil which is liquid at room temp, and Whole Foods carries it too, add tablespoon to your morning coffee. Or buy coconut oil capsules and take 2 morning and 2 night.
We are big believers in the coconut oil.
We also saw a PT specialist a while back who specialized in sacral-cranial stuff. She was amazing. The key thing we learned was how bad a "head-forward" posture is in triggering headaches. If you imagine a drop of water dripping off your chin, where would it land? Trace it down. If the answer is your big toe or in front of that spot on the floor you have head forward posture. Focus on bringing your head and chin back towards shoulders, you want that drop of water to hit your sternum. All these hand held devices and laptops train us head-forward and looking down. Bad. She also did dry needling. That helped relieve some muscle knots. Totally weird trick she taught her which at first I thought was crazy...if you get headache, Step 1: focus on realigning head away from "head forward" (focus, you should notice that with head forward your jaw is closed and teeth touching...when you retract your head back towards shoulders you should notice that automatically your lower jaw drops just slightly open, this releases tension in jaw). Step 2: take the tip of your tongue and attempt to stick it onto the surface of your furthest rear molar on your upper jaw on one side of your mouth. Hold that few seconds. Move that to other side of jaw, again touch tongue to upper rear molar. See if you do not feel tension release.
We also started allergy shots for the birch pollen 4 months ago. And we did a whole bunch of very high quality probiotics and glutamine, to help heal the gut because I suspected the food allergy probably happened at least partially due to some gut permeability...proteins getting in blood causing allergy and inflammation. She ate an apple last week, with no itchy mouth, no hives, no closing throat. (she did this without mom's approval at school...teenagers!) Had prior not been able to eat a tree fruit without a reaction and the reactions were escalating.
Hope this info helps someone, I think the ketones/coconut thing was key for her.
Weird coincidence...both my daughter, and my friend's daughter (who is an identical twin and her sister does not have migraine) who suffers chronic migraine, both of them also had prior to onset of migraine motion sickness in cars for several years. Anyone else?
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