How to Calm an Autoimmune Migraine
Migraines are absolutely terrible, aren’t they? I’ve suffered from them on several different occasions during my journey battling my autoimmune disease.
How do you get rid of them? There are many different reasons for why people get migraines, and therefore there are many different ways to get rid of them based on why you have them in the first place.
A few common reasons for migraines are unresolved physical injuries, inflammation in the brain and other parts of the body, toxicity, food sensitivities, and malnutrition in key vitamins and minerals. I recently just discovered that having the MTHFR gene mutation (which almost every autoimmune sufferer has) is also a source of migraines. Learn how to deal with the MTHFR gene mutation here.
How I Get Rid of My Headaches and Migraines
Now I’m going to tell you how I get rid of my headaches and migraines. My headaches come from a variety of sources, so the first thing I need to understand is the source. I seem to have three main sources of my headaches. The three trigger sources of my headaches are food sensitivities, stress, and old back and neck injuries.
Speaking of injuries...
As bad as my injuries have been the food sensitivities has actually been the factor that causes my migraines. Food sensitivitiess can also trigger a normal mild headache too.
The other two symptoms, stress and old back and neck injuries, sometimes work together to create a headache. Although the injuries all by itself under the right circumstances can trigger a headache too.
First Thing You Do - Find the Source
Let me tell you what I do. If I feel a headache coming on, I immediately start thinking, where is it coming from? Then I go from there. This is why I’ve done several articles talking only about common headache sources because if you don’t have this information, you can’t go anywhere. You’re done. People will either take medications adding to their toxicity or suffer it out. Both of these options stink, so I encourage you to work hard at trying to find the source.
If it’s a muscular/skeletal related headache, I understand that what is happening is that there’s tension in my neck that results in either vasodilation or vasoconstriction. The vasodilation will cause too much blood flow to my head, causing extra pressure in my head hence the head pain. While the vasoconstriction will cause not enough blood flow. Usually understanding the exact trigger of my headache tells me which it is. I just had a headache yesterday that I had to deal with so I have a fresh example for you.
Muscular/Skeletal Headaches
The exact trigger yesterday was my hat. We were out in the sun yesterday, and I have a hat that I really like that sometimes sits a little tight on my head.
We were relaxing next to a tree by the lake with friends so I know that stress was not a factor. We prepared the food so I know we didn’t eat anything I’m allergic to, therefore I know it wasn’t food sensitivities.
Eventually after having the hat on for a few hours, I noticed the back of my neck started getting tense. I know this feeling very well, and sure enough, by the evening it had developed into what I would call a stage three headache. Stage zero is nothing, and stage 10 is feeling like my head is going to explode. So three is not that bad, but it can be enough to keep me from falling sleeping.
So let me see if you can figure it out. Having a tight hat on my head, would that be causing vasoconstriction or vasodilation? Too little blood or too much? Have your answer? It would be vasoconstriction, causing too little blood flow to my head. Now that I know that my headache source was a purely muscular skeletal issue casing vasoconstriction, I have direction as to how to treat it.
Method1: Hydrotherapy
This is where hydrotherapy comes in. Hydrotherapy is simply the moving around of blood in your body by the use of hot and cold water. It sounds too simple to be a valid solution right? Big time wrong! Hydrotherapy is very powerful! Hot and cold water is the most effective means of moving blood around in your body. And you don’t even need a prescription for it.
Hot water draws blood, while cold water repeals it. You know how when your hands and feet get cold in the winter you start to lose feeling and mobility in them? This is a good example of how cold repeals blood, in this example it would be the from the limbs. With heat you may notice when you come out of a hot shower or sauna your skin has a reddish tint to it? That’s all the blood coming to the surface of the skin due to the hot stimuli.
So let me ask you, if I have vasoconstriction causing too little blood flow to my head due to the tight hat, what do I need to put on my head — hot or cold? If you guessed hot, you are right! You can reward yourself with a hot shower tonight.
So that’s what I did. I heated up a hot pack (which is essentially just a long cotton sack filled flax, rice, barley, or other dry grain) in the microwave and put it on my neck and head for about 10 minutes. A towel doused in hot water will work also. I laid down and my wonderful wife gave me a five minute massage on my neck, then I put the hot pack back on. Within 10 minutes of that, I was out for the night and I woke up feeling perfect.
If the headache would have been a result of vasodilation causing too much blood flow to my head, I would have put my head and neck in a cold shower or placed an ice pack on it while lying down.
Many of these injury based headache triggers require professional help. Seeing a chiropractor or physical therapist can mean the difference. However, I’ve seen three therapists and one chiropractor without any avail. But thankfully, that’s not everyone’s experience. They can often be a real help.
If you’re not sure if you should do hot or cold, you can just test with one or the other. If you try hot and it hurts worse, then you have your answer — you need cold. The goal is to try to get yourself asleep. Often times tension headaches and even migraines will disappear if you can just get yourself asleep.
Relieving Food Sensitivity Headaches
If I get a headache immediately after a meal, I know almost for certain that it’s a food reaction. This is especially true if we’re eating out or at a friends home. Not everyone knows how to accommodate people with food allergies even when they try. Many times we’ve had friends swear to us that the meal didn’t have gluten or soy, then after asking them a little more about the ingredients they would say, oh you mean Bragg Liquid Aminos has soy in it? You mean packaged bread crumbs is still gluten? They mean well and we love them, but that doesn’t take my headache away.
Method 2: Activated Charcoal
In this case you essentially have to look at it as a poisoning. This may sound drastic but that’s how your body is identifying it. What you can do is take activated charcoal as soon as possible. Activated charcoal adsorbs poisons and toxins. It’s a fantastic natural remedy and can be easily ordered online. We’ve taken it on many occasions and it’s worked wonderfully.
If we’ve eaten something that our digestion is protesting with bloating and gas, we will feel better within 10 minutes of taking 1 tsp to 1 Tbs of activated charcoal powder mixed in a glass of water.
Because I have weak digestion, I will sometimes take the juice of a fresh squeezed lemon to help aid it. This enhances digestion by increasing the hydrochloric acid in the stomach which brings it to the necessary ph to further the food along in digestion.
Also, you don’t want to eat anymore food since you want the food already in your stomach to digest as soon as possible and start making it’s way out of the body.
Relieving Migraine Headaches
For me this goes along with the food sensitivities since all my migraines have been induced by toxic food. Besides the charcoal, the best approach for migraines is hydrotherapy.
The particular hydrotherapy treatment done for migraines is different than the one done for injury-based tension headaches mentioned above. It’s more complicated and labor intensive and will require assistance of someone else to perform the treatment on you. If you’re married or live with family or friends who are willing to learn, you can teach them this treatment to do for you when a migraine strikes.
Method 3: Use Hydrotherapy on the Spine to Fall Asleep
Again, the goal is to fall asleep as many migraines can completely subside if you can just fall asleep.
For many years my grandmother suffered from migraines and would stop them by just falling asleep. It was so effective that when she got one she would go down for a 15-20 minute power nap and wake up feeling 100% better. Some people actually didn’t believe she had migraines because she would be able to get rid of them so fast by just falling asleep. But she did have migraines and just figured out how to deal with them.
You might be asking the obvious question though, how do you fall asleep if your head is pounding? I’m not sure how Grandma was able to do it and not everyone is fortunate enough to be able to do that like she could. I’m one of those people who can’t, and I think most people are too. I can’t fall asleep if my head hurts. If you’re like me, then what you need is hydrotherapy.
The Hydrotherapy Treatment
You need the following:
- Four cotton towels (size of hand towels)
- One body sized towel
- One towel about the size of your patients back
- A bucket of ice water
- A pot of hot water barely simmering on the stove
1. Have the person with the headache lay down face first on the bed with their shirt off. Put a large, body-sized towel under them so the bed or couch they’re laying on doesn’t get wet.
Also place one of the bathroom sized hand towels on their back covering their spine. The reason for this is because you’re going to apply alternating hot and cold towel treatments along the spine.
Often the hot towels are too hot to go directly on the skin so this one towel layer will act as a heat buffer.
The towels should be about the length of a bathroom hand towel. These are typically the perfect size because when laid out they’re about the length of an adult’s spine.
2. Stick the cold towel in the bucket of ice water and let it sit for later. It will be used on your patients back after they get three rounds of hot towels.
3. Bring a pot of water to a simmer on the stove. Then take one of the three other towels, grab the edges and twist it so it winds up. Then dip it in the simmering water enough for it to get saturated, but without getting the ends you’re holding wet to protect your hands. Pull it out of the water and wring it out by pulling the towel straight and taught. Then apply it to the patients spine, yet not directly on the skin but on top of the towel lying on their back. You may want to wear oven mitts for this step.
4. Do a series of three hot towels in a row then do one cold towel. All towels are applied to the patients spine. You want to keep each hot towel on the spine for about a minute. Since there are three hot towels it should be about three minutes total of hot and one of cold.
To trap in the heat of the hot towels put another dry towel on top of it during the minute it's sitting on the patients back.
Be sure to be ready to lift the hot towel off of the persons back if it’s too hot.
Usually it will be too hot upon the first application. Encourage the person receiving the treatment to take the hot towel as much as they can without burning their skin. The hotter they can take it the better.
5. After the three hot towels immediately put on the cold towel. People won’t like the cold towel but too bad, it needs to happen if they’re going to get better. Keep the cold towel on also for about a minute.
6. You do this rotation over and over and usually about the third or fourth round. The poor migraine victim will start to calm down and possibly even fall asleep. You may even need to do up to five or six rotations if necessary.
Important Notes
Some important notes, before applying the towels you need to wring out most of the water. This is ESPECIALLY true with the hot towels because the more hot water there is in the towel the more likely it is to burn. It should be very moist, but not soaked or dripping.
Also as soon as you take off a hot towel and put another on you will want to place the recently used hot towel back in the simmering pot. Also putting the towels in the microwave for a minute or two wrapped in a plastic grocery bag works too.
This has been the ONLY thing that takes my migraines away. It’s worked over and over. The hot and cold on the spine has an incredible relaxing effect. Once asleep I’m home free and I usually wake up feeling like nothing happened.
Inflammation Headaches
For headaches resulting in inflammation remember the first approach should always be to stop exposing the body to things causing the inflammation. This could be GMO foods, non-organic foods, wheat, or chemical laden processed foods. It also could be other environmental triggers like chemical fumes, smoke, heavy metals, mold, or copper contamination.
Method 4: Curamin
Otherwise, if you have a headache and need a something make it subside you could try Curamin supplement capsules. These contain high amounts of curcumin which is the active ingredient in turmeric that decreases inflammation. There’s a special blend that’s geared to help stress headaches also.
My wife experienced about a 90% reduction in pain when we used this after an indoor surfing accident that almost made her pass out from pain.
I hope this helps and remember it doesn’t help to take supplements without addressing lifestyle factors. And usually the best place to start is your kitchen. Take a look at my post on the top 3 toxins causing autoimmune diseases in your kitchen.
Dandelion or Coffee Enemas
Ok, this is where this article get's a little personal but they work. Dandelion and coffee enemas are exactly what they sound like. You take about two cups of either dandelion tea or organic coffee into your large intestine via your rectum and retain it for 10-15 minutes.
The Dandelion enema is preferable to the coffee enema since some coffee is actually absorbed into your system and may cause some of the common side effects coffee has like being unable to fall asleep.
In a coffee enema, the caffeine goes through the hemorrhoidal vein into the portal system directly to the liver, stimulating the liver to release bile1 and accumulated toxins with it. It also increases the body’s best detoxifying antioxidant, glutathione, by 600% in the liver and 700% in the small intestine.2 This is why natural healing facilities such as the Gerson Institute have used coffee enemas as a part of their treatment of cancer patients since the 1950s. When used with the rest of the therapy, their report of clinical findings is that “this therapy has cured many cases of advanced cancer.”3
Cancer patients often experience high levels of pain. But the damage that pain medications do the liver make it impossible to heal from cancer while using them. Coffee enemas have been able to powerfully relieve pain in cancer patients without the use of pain medication.
Up until 1972, coffee enemas were found in the renowned Merck Manual,4 the world’s best-selling medical textbook and the global standard in medical reference for doctors, students, and consumers for over 100 years.
Although there are yet no specific studies on the effectiveness of dandelion tea enemas, the latest clinical evidence is showing that they are just as effective as coffee enemas, but I believe are a better alternative as dandelion does not contain any caffeine. Dandelion tea enemas have taken my headaches away within seven minutes after being introduced into my body. They help assist the liver in throwing off it's toxic burden relieving headaches due to toxicity. They work.
Dandelion Tea Enema
1 Tbs dried dandelion leaf, organic (or 3 Tbs fresh)
2 cups water
1 tsp epsom salt
Preparation and use: Bring water to a boil and seep ground dandelion greens for 30 minutes. Let cool to lukewarm prior to using in enema. After fluid has been inserted lay on right side for 10-15 minutes then expel.
References
1 Kim ES, Chun HJ, Keum B, et al. “Coffee enema for preparation for small bowel video capsule endoscopy: a pilot study.” Clinical Nutrition Research 3.2 (July 2014): 134-141.
2 Sparnins VL, Venegas PL, Wattenberg LW. “Glutathione S-Transferase Activity: Enhancement by Compounds Inhibiting Chemical Carcinogenesis and by Dietary Constituents.” Journal of the National Cancer Institute 68 (Mar. 1982): 493-496.
3 Dr. Max Gerson. “The cure of advanced cancer by diet therapy: a summary of 30 years of clinical experimentation.” Physiological Chemistry and Physics 10.5 (1978): 449-464.
4 Lyght CE, Keefer CS, Lukens FDW, Richards DW, Sebrell WH , Trapnell JM. “Bedside procedures.” The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy 11th ed. Rahway, NJ: Merck Sharp & Dohme Research Laboratories, 1966: 1682-1683.
