127. Triggered With Dr.Leslie: Vomiting And Migraines

In this episode of Triggered with Dr. Leslie, I respond to another migraine reel making the rounds online, this one about why some migraines seem to improve after vomiting.

I break down what I believe is actually happening in the body during a migraine, why nausea and vomiting can sometimes bring relief, and why I do not believe this points to a defective “migraine brain.”

We talk about migraines very differently here: not as a random neurological curse, but as a sign that the body is overloaded and trying to protect you.

If you’re ready to address the root drivers of your migraines, you can book a free consultation at the link below:

https://www.drlesliecisar.com/apply

Free Training: 5 Proven Steps to Being Migraine Free (Even if you think you've already tried everything.)

https://www.drlesliecisar.com/5SHMN

Connect with us:

Website: https://www.drlesliecisar.com/

Free Facebook Group: Healing Migraines Naturally, with Leslie Cisar, ND

Ready to try something radically different that actually works? Read more about my approach here: https://www.drlesliecisar.com/map

In health,
Dr. Leslie Cisar

Episode Transcript

hi there it's Doctor Leslie
welcome to another episode of triggered
with Doctor Leslie so this is where I um uh
rant and rave about the
some of the ridiculous migraine
reels that are out there on social media um
so today we are back with Doctor Painkiller
if you've been following this series
this guy really really really triggers me
so we're gonna
we're gonna take a look at at one of his latest
why do some migraines vanish right after you throw up
the answer is wild and it's the same reason
okay so he's saying you know
talking about the observation that sometimes vomiting
people will feel a lot better after they vomit right
so you know nausea it's a very common migraine symptom
and many times people will feel better
the migraine will start to lift
if they can manage to vomit
now this is a tough one
because a lot of people will do everything
possible to not vomit hahaha
right it's like a lot of people say
oh you know
I haven't vomited in 20 years
because I don't let myself vomit
no matter how nauseous I am
another factor is because migraine is uh
because uh nausea is such a common migraine symptom
a lot of people with migraines are given anti
nausea medications to take along with their migraine
abortive medication to relieve that symptom nausea
it's a horrible symptom oh my gosh
a lot of times you know
people would rather have the head pain than the nausea
so um
it's you know
it's it's one of the absolutely
more common migraine symptoms
that comes along with the head pain and
and like I said
it's a terrible symptom nausea is a real drag
why an expensive device works
here's what's actually happening
vomiting is one of the most powerful
natural activators of the Vegas nerve
okay so here we go with the Vegas nerve talk okay
so
the Vegas nerve talk is very prominent in the migraine
community
so
he's saying that vomiting stimulates the Vegas nerve
the Vegas nerve is what is called a cranial nerve
so it's a nerve that's coming right out of your brain
through the brain stem
and it innervates your internal organs
so this is different than
a spinal nerve that's exiting and going into your body
for through the
the foramen or the opening between your vertebrae
you have 10 cranial nerves
so there are there are 12 cranial nerves that are um
not coming out through your spine
so the Vegas nerve is one of them and it innervates um
your internal organs including your stomach
which connects your gut directly to your brain stem
that vagal signal lights up a relay station
called the nucleus tractus solitarius
which triggers a release of norepinephrine
and serotonin which suppresses the trigeminal pain
pathways that drive migraine
okay so here he's talking about you know
neurotransmitters and and he's making a claim that um
these neurotransmitters are suppressing
the pathways
within the trigeminal nerve that drive the migraine
so this is a hypothesis
officially they really don't know
the biochemical or the physiological cause of migraine
it's it's considered to be
sort of a medical mystery as to what causes migraine
so he's kind of stating this pretty definitively
and I would say that that is a hypothesis
within the conventional model
hi there
I wanna jump in real quick and tell you about my client
Beth she was getting 15 to 20 migraines and headaches
per month and as you can imagine
this was impacting her work
performance and her confidence
she also has two small children
and she was
starting to feel like she was a horrible mom
because she had nothing left for them
at the end of the day but she reached out
and she booked a free consult call with me
and after I asked her about her migraines
and her health history
I felt confident that I could help her
I help women uncover
the root drivers of their migraines
and follow a step by step plan to dramatically reduce
the frequency by up to 90%
without adding more medication
or taking a bunch of supplements
so we built her personal migraine map
followed the plan
and now she will get one to two migraines per year
which she uses ibuprofen to treat if she needs to
verses up to 15 to 20 per month
when we first started working together
that weren't responding well to any medication
she just reached out to tell me that
she got a promotion at work
she's on top of her career again
and has been able to come off
all of her migraine medication
but most importantly she's a confident mom again
and she's attending birthday parties at Jump Zone
with her kids and saying yes
instead of saying maybe later
I've worked with women like Beth
from all over the United States
who were told this is the best we can do
but they were still willing to dig deeper
so
if you are serious about changing your migraine story
go to Doctor Leslie Caesar dot com slash apply
or tap the link in the show notes
and on our free consult
we'll map out why your migraines keep coming back
and the first three steps you can take
over the next 30 days
I do cap new client spots each month
so if the calendar is full
the doors are closed for now
but if you're done feeling helpless
and ready to do the work to heal
pause this episode for 30 seconds
and book that console call now
in other words your body
just performed
a crude version of a vagus nerve stimulation
which is an FDA cleared migraine treatment
and so what he's saying is that
that whole process is very similar to doing
what is called vagus nerve stimulation on yourself okay
so there are different devices
that will stimulate the vagus nerve
basically send more sort of input into the nerve
you could think of this as
if the nerve is a little bit sluggish
you're adding in a little bit more
like a voltage energy to the nerve
and so
what he's saying is that vomiting kind of recreates
that the process of vomiting um
recreates what a vagal nerve stimulator would do
or a vagus nerve stimulator would do
like a cephaly device
for obvious ethical reasons
no trial has randomized patients to vomit
versus no vomit the evidence is entirely observational
and patient reported but
yeah so
you know he's saying they've never done a study on this
where they've kind of
you know you can
you can uh
give drugs to people that make them vomit
there are herbs that you could give people
that would make them vomit
so he's saying
they've never really done a study to kind of determine
you know if we force people to vomit
and we get this cascade of neurotransmitters going
and we get the Vegas nerve stimulated
we don't know what percentage of people's migraines
would start to remit after we did that
it would be
it's kind of an unpleasant study
but an important caveat
vomiting often happens later in the attack anyway
so some of the relief
may simply be that the migraine is naturally
winding down and no
he's sort of
I'm not quite sure where he's going with this
because at the beginning I thought he was saying that
the process of vomiting is stimulating the vagus nerve
and that's a benefit to a migraine sufferer
and that's contributing to the lifting of the migraine
but now he's saying well
the vomiting usually comes
kind of later on in the attack
and so maybe the migraine was gonna lift anyway
so um I'm not quite sure where he's going with this
I would say
you know do we know
I mean has anybody really done
the research to determine
where in the migraine do most people vomit
or whatever in my clinical experience
I would say that it's it's a little hard to say that
you know all of this
all all of his explanation
here is going under the Assumption
that migraines are a neurological disease
he frequently uses the term migraine brain
so in other reels he's
posited that those of us who are prone to migraines
actually have a migraine brain
our brain is somehow different
and this
this concept has really swept the migraine community
when I first started working exclusively
with women with chronic migraines
nine years ago
nobody was talking like this but now you know
you can't go on TikTok or Insta
or Facebook and not find a migraine influencer
talking about the migraine brain
and how we have a migraine brain
and our brain is wired differently
and our brain is the migraine brain is just inherently
innately congenitally more hypersensitive than you know
a non migraine brain and I this
this is one of the main reasons why I started this
you know
little series called triggered with Doctor Leslie
because it has really
really galvanized me because if you like
this kind of messaging is going to shipwreck
people's health OK
you and I do not have a migraine brain OK
so let me talk about from what my framework is
which I think
very easily explains why people get nauseous and vomit
when they have a migraine so
a migraine is not a neurological disease
it's not a defect in your brain
you don't have faulty wiring in your brain
which actually this doctor painkiller neurologist
medical doctor actually said in a reel
that there's faulty wiring in the brain
of migraine suffers none of that is true okay
a migraine is a hangover without the alcohol okay
so when you you know somebody
somebody goes out on a Friday night
and they over consume
and they wake up Saturday morning
what do they experience okay
so even if you've never had a hangover
maybe you've seen it portrayed in a movie
what do people experience
when they poison themselves with alcohol
well they wake up the next morning
and they got bags under their eyes and dark circles
and they're all puffy and bloated
they've retained a whole bunch of water
their face is blown up their head is pounding
they're very very sensitive to light
where are my sunglasses somebody close the blinds
I'm dying here they're very irritable
they're very sensitive to noise
will you quit tapping
will you quit making so much noise
can't you see I'm hungover
you're driving me crazy here
be quiet
they're very sensitive to odors
oh my goodness
what is this trash here somebody take the trash out
I'm gonna puke because of these odors right
they're very very nauseous
they've been vomiting right
maybe before you know
in the middle of the night
they're vomiting the next morning okay
so when we have become poisoned by a substance okay
somebody consumes too much alcohol
if they drink uh
some sort of poison if they eat
you know deadly nightshade berries
the body vomits okay
when you've become poisoned
your body wants to get the poison out of your body
and so it makes you vomit okay
haha
even animals if they eat something poisonous
they will vomit okay
this is not rocket science here folks
when the body has been poisoned by a substance
nausea and vomiting is a pretty typical response
so this is why when you have a migraine
one of the very common
symptoms that comes along with it
is nausea and in some cases
actual vomiting okay
because
you are having an acute overload of metabolic waste
materials and toxins circulating in your bloodstream
and your body is generating acute toxicity symptoms
I've talked about this on my podcast
I even did an episode walking
everybody through this and reading the symptoms
reading various poisoning symptoms okay
so going through different
you know
typical poisons that people might be exposed to
and what symptoms have been documented
with that exposure hmm
those symptoms sound like a migraine okay
this is not a coincidence
this is how the body operates so nausea and vomiting
right it's a protective mechanism this isn't I mean
if you want to talk about neurotransmitters
and Vegas nerve I mean
you can do all of that right
but it doesn't answer the question
why did my body do this in the first place
the conventional answer is that your body is stupid
defective broken
you've got some sort of screwed up brain
that doesn't know what the heck it's doing
and so you're vomiting for no reason
that couldn't be farther from the truth
and I and I wanna go a little deeper into this
because this is also something that
people are not putting
the pieces of the puzzle together
so
you have to have enough vitality to generate symptoms
I've also talked about this on the podcast
so in order to generate symptoms
whether they're allergy symptoms
cold symptoms you know
cold and flu symptoms migraine symptoms
the body has to have enough energy to actually do that
so it takes energy
it takes vitality to generate symptoms
so when people first start getting migraines
what's very common doesn't happen all the time
but what's very common when people first
start getting migraines
the attack you know
uh oh I'm getting a migraine right
and people will get a sort of profound migraine
their head really pounds they're really nauseous
they're vomiting they're having a loose stool right
again loose stool
we're flushing things out of the body
that's what the body wants to do
when it's been poisoned
it's like get everything out of here right
so nothing more gets absorbed
so we're vomiting we're having
we're running the bathroom right
the body is supposed to do this
when it's been acutely poisoned
so when when people first start getting migraines
many times those first migraines
they're really severe they're like
holy cow what was that right
I was like my head was pounding
I was in the bathroom I was vomiting right
and then oh wow okay
I'm better right
the first stage of migraines is usually
a pretty severe attack
but we're coming through it pretty quickly
it's a couple hours and then we're like
oh okay great
who what was that
I'm I'm
but I'm good to go now right
what and so that
that's a body generating that sort of extreme response
that's a body that has a lot of vitality
cause it's like oh my goodness
I got a I got a toxin overload in here
we gotta handle this right away
and the troops are rallied right
there's a good response is mustered by the body
to take care of the problem
problem solved okay bounce back
I feel better what happens to people is over time
because they don't realize what's going on
so they're not taking action
and they're not addressing the problem
what happens to people is the toxin load
the underlying toxin load in the body
accumulates and accumulates and accumulates
their vitality becomes diminished okay
they're taking medication you know
starting off with Advil or etcetera
and they're moving on to prescriptions
ultimately preventatives
they're adding more toxins from the drugs
so they're they have more of a load from that
and the body can't generate the same level of response
so the overload is still there
the body wants to robustly handle the situation
but it can't
it doesn't have enough vitality to do that
so now instead of wow man
that was a crazy two hours but hey
I'm up and Adam it's oh my goodness
my head is hurting for 3 days right
it's like will this ever will this ever lift
we even call it a migraine hangover
why do we call it a migraine hangover
cause it feels like a hangover it's like oh yeah okay
I'm not like dead to the world but man
I still don't feel good right
the the migraine drags on and on and on
if we had more vitality
we'd be able to muster a more robust response
and the body would be able to do what it needs to do to
to process this toxin
overload and we would feel better a lot quicker
when you vomit
you know again
I was young once I over consumed alcohol
I have vomited right it's like right you you get
you know you get a 22 year old at a summer fest
and they over consume Milwaukee's finest
and then they vomit they go
oh good good to go right
I feel so much better now that I vomited
it's cause you got right
you're not continuing to bring that poison in
so um yes
you if you have you know
if you have food in your stomach and you get a migraine
your body wants to get that food out of there
and you vomit and then you're not absorbing
toxic by products from digestion
because you got the food out of there okay
that's it yes
it helps make you feel better
absolutely it's gonna help you make
it's gonna help make you feel better
the vomiting is a mechanism to remove
a toxin load out of the digestive track
rotting food out of the digestive track
but if you you have to have enough vitality to vomit
this is the thing
so a lot of migraine sufferers will say
you know when I first started getting migraines
I used to vomit all the time
I get a migraine I vomit right
oh boy I haven't vomited in years
but I have this horrible nausea
I have this horrible nausea that's just terrible
but I haven't vomited in a long time
sometimes I wish I could vomit
maybe I would feel better if I could vomit right
this is so so common thing that migraine sufferers say
because to have to
to get that vomiting response
you have to have enough vitality to generate the
the throwing up
so then
people get stuck in this lower level nausea
that's just so terrible and they wish they could vomit
that's that's what's actually going on here
when you look at migraine through the framework of
you're experiencing an acute toxin overload
in that moment and then your body is doing what it does
when there's a toxin overload
it doesn't matter whether it's alcohol
whether it's deadly nightshade berries
or whether it's just migraine right
it's like well
what are you talking about
Doctor Leslie I haven't had alcohol in years
I can't even drink without getting a bad migraine
yeah I know
you have an accumulated
toxin load that you're carrying around all the time
that you're unaware of
and the migraine what the migraine is
is sort of the final straw that um your
you your toxin bucket has
you're walking around with is totally up to the top
and a migraine is when that bucket tips over
the toxins spill out all over the floor
you have a rush of toxins into your bloodstream
from that bucket
hi there
I wanna jump in real quick and tell you about my client
Beth she
was getting 15 to 20 migraines and headaches per month
and as you can imagine
this was impacting her work performance
and her confidence she also has two small children
and she was
starting to feel like she was a horrible mom
because she had nothing left for them
at the end of the day but she reached out
and she booked a free consult call with me
and after I asked her about her migraines
and her health history
I felt confident that I could help her
I help women uncover
the root drivers of their migraines
and follow a step by step plan to dramatically reduce
the frequency by up to 90%
without adding more medication
or taking a bunch of supplements
so we built her personal migraine map
followed the plan
and now she will get one to two migraines per year
which she uses ibuprofen to treat if she needs to
verses up to 15 to 20 per month
when we first started working together
that weren't responding well to any medication
she just reached out to tell me that
she got a promotion at work
she's on top of her career again
and has been able to come off
all of her migraine medication
but most importantly she's a confident mom again
and she's attending birthday parties at Jump Zone
with her kids and saying yes
instead of saying maybe later
I've worked with women like Beth
from all over the United States who were told
this is the best we can do
but they were still willing to dig deeper
so
if you are serious about changing your migraine story
go to Doctor Leslie Caesar dot com slash apply
or tap the link in the show notes
and on our free consult
we'll map out why your migraines keep coming back
and the first three steps you can take
over the next 30 days
I do cap new client spots each month
so if the calendar is full
the doors are closed for now
but if you're done
feeling helpless and ready to do the work to heal
pause this episode for 30 seconds
and book that console call now
and you're experiencing the accompanying
the normal toxicity
symptoms that people get
when they've been poisoned by something
it's just
you were kind of carrying that around all the time
and then
that migraine attack is when it all spilled out
tipped over versus oh I had
you know 10 shots of whiskey oh
I ate these berries in the woods
and they were actually poisonous
so that's actually what a migraine is
so it would make a lot of sense
that you would feel nauseous
and vomit in those conditions
your body is just doing what it does
when there's a toxin overload
so yeah vomiting in that situation for most people
they're gonna feel better right
just like if you drank a bunch of alcohol
if you drank
if you ate a bunch of poisonous berries in the woods
your body's gonna wanna get that out
and it'll help you
it'll help you feel better as unpleasant as it is
so you know he's gonna
I'm sure he's gonna continue to go on here
and talk about you know how your
how your brain is defective and it's not wired properly
and you have a migraine brain and everything else
please that's not the case if that were the case
I'd be laying in bed right now
I wouldn't be talking to you
I wouldn't be triggered hahaha
I would have had
I would have been triggered and gone into a migraine
but I wouldn't be triggered here by these reels
you can recover from this
just like I recovered from it
just like my clients recover from it
this is you know um
it it takes work um it takes expert guidance
that's what I've been developing over the years
I have a great deal of expertise in this
so I'm not saying it's easy
I'm not saying that you know
you just take uh
some sort of miracle herb from the Amazon
and you're gonna feel better
it takes real work
it takes
real understanding of what the particular factors are
for you that's driving this
but at the root that's what's going on here
and that's why you're experiencing these symptoms
you're experiencing toxicity symptoms
when you get a migraine
that's what a migraine is the same types of symptoms
that you get if you over consume other toxins
like alcohol
or you are poisoned by arsenic or strychnine
or nightshade berries or whatever
it's the same type of symptoms that the body generates
when it's been poisoned
what's what you just don't realize is
you're walking around with a high level of of uh
you know toxin load and when it overspills
when it finally overflows
and dumps everything out into your bloodstream
that's what a migraine is
and your body and it's good design and its wisdom
sort of mops everything back up after that
and tries to put it back into the bucket
and that's when you actually feel better
but then your bucket is still up to the top
so then any little thing is gonna tip it over again
and then
you're gonna go through the whole thing all over again
we gotta get the bucket drained
that's the solution to this
we've got to get the bucket drained
and then you've got room for extra
you've got room to inhale some perfume molecules
you've got room to eat some MSG at a restaurant right
you've got room that you can put some additional toxins
into that bucket and you're still gonna feel OK
and it's not gonna tip over
and you're not gonna
continue to go through all of this so um
it's I hope that helps like I say
it's when you understand what's actually going on here
it makes a ton of sense
and you don't have to talk about all this
fancy biochemical terms and so on
so hope you enjoyed it I'm sure you will see me soon
because I'm sure I'm going to get triggered again
soon by some of these reels I will talk to you soon