Holistic Treatment.

It isn’t something that is present in modern medicine. My question is why not?

Maybe it’s too complicated to try and look at the big picture. Maybe with how specialized each doctor has become, somewhere along the way they lost their qualifications for everything besides their specific niche in the medical community.

There are 7 chakras. Modern medicine practitioners pay no attention to making sure our chakras remain in a line and remain balanced.

Yet, each chakra connects to a specific area of our body and manifests with physical properties.

Crown chakra – located at the top of the head with a physical association to the pineal gland, brain, and nervous system.

Third Eye Chakra – located between the eyes on the forehead with a physical association to the pituitary gland, eyes, and sinuses.

Throat Chakra – located in your throat with a physical association to your thyroid, respiratory system, teeth, and vocal chords.

Heart Chakra – located centrally above your heart with a physical association to your heart, thymus, lower lungs, and circulatory system.

Solar Plexus Chakra – located in your upper abdomen by your stomach with a physical association to your central nervous system, pancreas, liver, digestive tract, and skin.

Sacral Chakra – located roughly 2 inches below the naval with a physical association to your reproductive organs, kidneys, bowels, and immune system.

Root Chakra – located at the base of your spine with a physical association to your spine, rectum, legs, arms, and circulatory system.

So, what’s the connection?

If you think of how migraine manifests itself, the symptoms and pain are present in every chakra location. To start, it is a neurological disorder meaning it’s rooted in the nervous system and brain. A large portion of the pain is centered behind the eyes and often directly where the “third eye” is located. Pain also manifests in the teeth. As we transition from pain to other symptoms, the rest of the chakras fall in line as well. Relating to your heart, often blood pressure and heart rate are impacted and the circulation system in migraine patients doesn’t always work properly. In our abdomen, we find where our nausea and sensitivity to foods. With our reproductive system and bowels we connect the idea that hormones play a role and the regularly associated GI issues. And finally, the circulatory system comes full circle at our root chakra.

The point really isn’t about my chakra’s not being properly in line and that’s to blame for migraines, but more along the line that modern medicine ignores that migraine is a whole body condition with symptoms that manifest in multiple ways.

This is why massage therapy has still proven to be the most effective treatment for my migraines.

I sat this week in the doctors office because I may have finally unearthed what made my migraines change from a minor occurrence to a full blown interference in my life. Essentially, my knee injury from 2012 took roughly 3 years to heal. During those 3 years, I completely changed the way I walked and was overcompensating for my right knee. My final physical therapist worked with me to realign my hips and get me walking straight again. My theory was that in the time I was walking incorrectly, not only were my hips out of line, but perhaps so was my spine causing a minor shift in the vertebrae all the way up to the top potentially putting enough pressure on the C1 and C2 to serve as the initial trauma triggering my migraines.

Makes perfect sense to me. That injury was when I was a freshman in high school, by the end of junior year I had migraines.

But, my doctor seemed to think it was a coincidence because most migraines manifest between the ages of 17 and 24.

She quickly changed the subject and wanted to hear about my neck pain from my botox. Did a brief physical where she felt the alignment of my vertebrae and wasn’t able to tell if perhaps there was a slight curve.

And so, I’ll be going in to have a full x-ray of my spine to test for scoliosis.

She ended the appointment by suggesting I try another CGRP because she’s had patients with good success.

Plain and simple, my theory was simply that of coincidence, scoliosis is a separate minor concern, and I should try another medicine.

You’d think if scoliosis was a true concern, even mildly related to migraine, someone would have pointed it out before. Anyone from my massage therapists, to the chiropractor, to my general practitioner who looked over the chiropractor’s x-rays, to the physical therapist who was working on my neck. Each one had plenty of spinal examinations… Each one acknowledged that the top vertebrae or tense neck muscles could be contributing to the migraine pain.

So, yes I’ll get my x-ray and it could still allow me to see a spine specialist to identify if my knee injury may have been the initial trauma.

Yet no one has any idea for treating the whole.

No one wants to put together the reaction I had to the Botox that points to perhaps a misdiagnosis of chronic migraine… as Botox only treats a specific type of migraine. When I said this to my doctor, she explained that it didn’t matter what type of migraine I have, the treatments are the same… except they aren’t.

What if we focused on the whole picture. The migraines, the neck and upper back tension, the tender base of skull, the ringing in my ears, the higher than normal resting heart rate, the nausea, the way I pick at my cuticles, the fatigue, the insomnia, the vertigo, the consistency of injuries that don’t heal or don’t have a clear diagnosis, the severe allergies and constant mucus production, the constant dehydration, my sensitivity to heat and humidity…

If we looked at that whole picture, would we see something that isn’t simply “migraine”?

Are there symptoms that I don’t even know about? Or symptoms that haven’t presented themselves yet?

Clearly, treatments for migraine don’t work for me. At what point do we ask the question, what else could this be? Or do we accept that there’s simply a more severe version of migraine that just doesn’t respond?

It isn’t scoliosis, that’s one thing I can say with confidence.

But maybe it isn’t migraine either.

A.