Migraine Headache – Below is a transcript from a video I shared on Instagram recently. In this video, I share the evolution of my thoughts on migraine, and how to dress it. If you’d like to learn how to put these insights into action, my Repattern Migraine Masterclass provides concrete way to navigate mineral, emotional, and social factors.
Originally, I couldn’t really understand where my migraines were coming from. I started getting migraines after a really bad course of antibiotics that I had in my early 30s. I actually had headaches intermittently prior to that. Incidentally, I remember getting bad migraine headaches that started when I was about twelve when I got my mood, and also at a time when I had some medications that didn’t sit well with my system.
I didn’t make those connections at that time, but the migraine headaches weren’t ever really bad or frequent enough for me to think much about them or wonder why I was getting them. There was no regular, discernible pattern, at least not that I noticed – until the time when I got that dose of antibiotics in my early 30s.
Fluoride and Migraine Headache
Migraine Headache – If you’ve been following me and watching my videos, you know that I really point the finger at fluoride as a culprit of migraines. And it’s a culprit that no one else seems to have identified in chronic migraines. And I believe that actually fluoride poisoning and fluoride toxicity from our water, but especially at more frequent doses from medications (such as anti-anxiety medications or antidepressants) is playing a huge role in chronic migraine. These people are not only going to be the most susceptible to chronic migraine, but they’re going to have the hardest time addressing it through mineral balancing.
It took me a really long time to figure out this fluoride piece. That actually wasn’t until the past year or so when I was starting to notice there are a few types of clients that I have that just aren’t as resilient and don’t respond as well to mineral balancing. And these were the clients who are on daily anti-anxiety medication.
I’ve known for a long time that people who are on pharmaceuticals just don’t respond as well to nutritional balancing. This is in part because the side effects that they cause come from the nutrient depletions that the medication cause. But I hadn’t known about the fluoride part of the puzzle.
So, long story short, my migraines got really bad in my early 30s, shortly after a large exposure to fluoride. And then this was exacerbated when I had a c-section operation with anesthesia and antibiotics that contain fluoride, along with all the sleep deprivation of raising my son. Plus, I was giving away my minerals through my breast milk. I breastfed for two years – not to mention the sheer amount of minerals that it takes to build a human being from scratch. We shouldn’t fail to mention that.
So at the time that my migraines got really bad after the C section, I was having nightmares and all kinds of other symptoms. I just remember thinking like “something is not right”. And I told my husband “something’s not right here”.
Folk Medicine Solutions to Migraine Headache
Since none of the doctors could help me, I eventually ended up just embarking upon a process of trying to figure out how to heal my migraines, and I initially came across prebiotics and carrot juice, which is very high in potassium. I didn’t realize at the time why getting the potassium was so helpful. In part, it’s because potassium in our body is regulated by progesterone, and my progesterone was probably quite low from all of the stress that I was experiencing, and so my body was having a hard time regulating potassium. So that carrot juicing was really helpful.
So I had started off healing more in what I would consider to be in the Folk Medicine Tradition of really looking at some old Folk Remedies such as, for example, an old Ukrainian treatment for headache and migraine is to eat raw potato. And it just so happens potato is full of potassium and other electrolytes like magnesium, and also full of prebiotics.
So I ended up basically developing a protocol that kept my migraines at bay, but I had to be so strict about what I was eating, and I had to be really diligent about doing these very high energy tasks like of lots of juicing, and I knew that there was a missing piece of the puzzle.
I was looking into minerals and mineral balancing. I had tried homeopathy. And I only actually tried medications once or twice. My aunt, who also has migraines and who also happened to have a c section like me – she gave me one of her triptans once. That’s actually the only time I took a pain medication for my migraines eventhough I actually lived in a migraine for two and a half years. I refused to take pain medications aside from that one time she gave me that medication.
It got rid of the migraine, and then the migraine came back a little later, and I remember just having this weird feeling like the migraine medication was simply just putting off and prolonging something that my body physiologically needed to do.
Migraine, Inflammation, and Detoxification
And it’s true that I believe migraine (and all health conditions) are intelligent, adaptive mechanisms. Migraine is swelling that occurs in the brain to help protect the neurons from oxidative damage and stress, and when we remove and reduce the reactive oxygen species and improve serotonin levels and have sufficient electrolytes, our brain doesn’t need to swell to protect those neurons.
So over time I eventually started to see that healing involves nutrition and nourishment, supporting the body, and getting out of this framework of suppression – getting out of the idea that the body is screwing up, and instead really starting to support the body as much as possible.
And over time, I learned that supporting the body as much as possible requires detoxification. I did many different forms of detoxification. And as it turns out, what I learned is that the best way to detoxify is to nourish your body. Because one reason why toxins build up isn’t just because of these assaults to our system that we get exposed to in large doses, but also because if we are deficient in the nutritional elements that help us to detoxify those toxins, they will build up, right?
There are a lot of so-called toxins, from medications to simple metabolic waste that builds up in the lymphatic spaces. When our lymphatic system is congested (which is related to the liver your liver not neutralizing toxins in the blood) it will build up the lymphatic spaces.
So then I basically found different ways to get rid of toxins. But my mineral profile (once I started studying Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis) is not one of high toxicity, at least not the toxins that show on the HTMA profile. Unfortunately, fluoride and the other halides don’t show up on an HTMA. So that’s one reason why it took me a really long time to figure out the fluoride piece of the puzzle.
The Limitations of Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis
None of the halides like fluoride and iodine show up on an HTMA lab, so it’s kind of funny that I’m using this lab that doesn’t even show the main culprits or a few of the main nutrients that I think are really at the core of healing migraine, which has to do with healing the thyroid system. But one reason the HTMA lab is still so, so useful is because fluoride and the other halide have a dynamic relationship with other minerals. So if you take something like iodine, you don’t want to just do that without knowing what your other mineral status is since iodine can lower copper and it can lower different things. You want to know what your mineral profile is when you go into detox, and when you go into using any minerals for healing.
And just in general, the HTMA is great, right? If you know about the mineral dynamics, it’s very helpful to be able to know what your levels are so that you don’t take too much of one mineral at the expense of another one, right?
So I studied HTMA methodology with a few different teachers and had a learning curve over the course of years. But even prior to that, I was really benefiting from the fact that I was healing my migraines without any training. This was before I had studied hDMA. There’s so much benefit to not being trained about how to think of about something. And I learned this once I studied HTMA because I literally had a roadblock for like three or four years where I couldn’t benefit from a certain mineral because the HTMA training told me to demonize that mineral, and I even had clients for years that I was helping that were having success, but they didn’t have as much success as they could have had if I hadn’t been trained to demonize certain minerals.
Luckily, with my discerning mind and my critical thinking and my willingness to experiment and think for myself, I eventually figured out the error in my training. And now that, combined with the knowledge about fluoride and how to get fluoride out – I have great success with clients, even clients who have been in the pharmaceutical paradigm.
A lot of people have their foot in both worlds. They have one foot in the pharmaceutical paradigm and then the other one in holistic. And there comes a point where you just have to make a decision, right? You have to decide between these paradigms and it’s a little tricky stepping off the pharmaceutical paradigm and getting onto the totally holistic approach. That’s when your body’s really going to get leverage.
Serotoning, The Status of Women and Reclaiming the Receptive Feminine
The evolution of my thought on migraine has come to me starting to look at neurochemistry and neurotransmitters like serotonin, that are greatly involved in migraines. We need to start to look at the relationships between not only which minerals are needed to make those neurotransmitters but also the way that hormones and neurotransmitters affect our mineral status. There’s a reciprocal relationship there.
And then additionally, we need to look at social-emotional nutrition, our social interactions, and the way that affects our stress levels, which then affects our mineral status – and especially when it comes to serotonin, and the status of women in our society.
Women, of course, get a lot more migraines than men, at least are more susceptible to them than men. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter implicated in migraine. I think I mentioned this in other videos that we get a hit of serotonin of when our life is fulfillin because our expectations are met, and when we have status. So, looked at it in that light, it’s not surprising that more women than men get migraines. And I think it’s especially hard for women who are very driven, who are hardworking and accomplishment-oriented when they don’t get the same recognition. Or if they are driving on adrenaline – since they don’t have as much testosterone as men – how much this can burn them out. So there’s a social and gender aspect to migraine that we can understand in mineral terms and neurotransmitter terms.
And then most recently, the evolution of my thought on migraine has taken me to consider not only women’s social status and how this affects their migraines, but the way in a patriarchy that most of us are operating from our doing mode and our masculine side at the expense of our receptive feminine side, which is the side that we need to be nourished. And the way our disconnection from our divine feminine receptivity (because it’s not valued in this patriarchal culture) the way that creates burnout and affects our ability to be supported by life and be held by life and be nourished by life.
So that’s what my work is about now: balancing the minerals, supporting women, and especially mothers, and working more towards a reorientation, untwisting ourselves from these distorted ways of being that don’t serve us as women. And then, realigning ourselves with our divine feminine agency and receptivity.
And value. It comes down to women’s values.
I go all of this over all this in the coursework, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this somewhat longer explanation for the way my thinking has changed over time about what migraine is and how we need to address it.
