ļ»æTriggered with Dr. Leslie
Migraine infographic critique
Dr. Leslie Cisar
Recording 0234 | Edited transcript | 49:17
[00:00]
Hi, everybody! Welcome to another episode of Triggered with Dr. Leslie. This is where I go through the migraine information on social media that really irritates me, frankly triggers me. So these are meant to be fun and informative. Mostly, this is tongue-in-cheek and good fun, but there is some legitimate irritation that I experience when I go through these things. So anyway, I hope you enjoy this series. I really enjoy making them.
[00:24]
So today, we're going to take a look at the Migraine World Summit post here. Migraine Monday. Hashtag Migraine Monday. So right out of the gate, I'm going to tell you why I get triggered by these types of posts. So this is one of the most common migraine posts on social media. And I'm sure that the person who does my marketing would be thrilled if I wanted to do more posts like these, but it just goes against every grain in my body to do these types of posts because these types of posts, what we're doing is we're focusing on the problem and we're not focusing on the solution.
[01:04]
And one of my major missions for women with chronic migraines, if you've been following the podcast, you'll know I used to be a chronic migraine sufferer myself. My whole recovery from migraines led me down this whole road to do a second career of being a naturopathic doctor. Trust me, I had a very nice career, a nice life before I decided to become a naturopathic doctor. I'm thrilled that I did it, but it's not like I had nothing else going on for my life.
[01:39]
This is my passion, this is what I wake up every morning just so excited to help other women because I know firsthand just how debilitating, how awful, how anxiety provoking, the whole nine yards with migraines. So, there's some positive aspects to these types of posts, but in general, I find them sort of irritating because, again, we're focusing on the problem. But I'm going to use this post and I want to go through the symptoms here because I want to talk about these common migraine symptoms and the clues that they're giving us to what's driving the migraine.
[02:18]
So we've got hashtag Migraine Monday, which again, it's like I know we're trying to raise awareness, I know we're trying to educate people, but I just feel like we're reinforcing the problem instead of helping people find the solutions. Okay, so this is why I'm taking this post and trying to do some real education. So here we have the phases of a migraine attack, right? So we have the prodrome phase.
[02:48]
That's like the, I call these symptoms the uh-oh moment, right? We all have this uh-oh moment where it's like, uh-oh, something's starting to brew. I can feel it, right? I don't have the the head pain yet or, whatever it is that is your major symptom when you get a migraine. But it's like, uh-oh, something's feeling out of whack here, something's a little disturbed. That fits in with that prodrome phase.
[03:12]
And then we have the aura phase. Okay, so this may or may not happen to people. Then we have the headache phase. Again, this is laying out sort of the classic migraine, what's called the classic migraine. There's also vestibular or hemiplegic migraines. This is more of the classic. They're laying out the classic migraine symptoms. That includes Head pain. And then we have the postdrome, the after effects.
[03:46]
We call this the migraine hangover. I feel like I got hit by a bus, even though I don't have the "migraine", anymore. That's the postdrome. And then we have the interictal phase. So this is the period of time between the phase, between the attack. So again, it's like we're never out of the woods, because we've got a chronic disease that we can't recover from and that we're gonna have to manage.
[04:15]
You have to look at the underlying philosophy of health and disease when you look at these posts. It's very important that we do that because otherwise we're taking in a worldview and a mindset that we may not be aware that we're taking in. And like I always say, it's not that our beliefs are creating anything, but our beliefs are gonna drive our action. And so if we're taking the wrong action, we're not going to get where we wanna go.
[04:46]
So let's take a look at the symptoms. So I wanna break down the symptoms in each of the phases. So we've got the prodrome phase, and they said this can start a few hours or even a few days before the migraine. So we've got mood changes. Now, for most people, this is gonna be irritability. Most women, we're gonna feel more irritable. that's definitely something that I've experienced.
[05:11]
It's actually sort of an early warning symptom for me. If I start getting more irritable, things that normally don't bother me are starting to make me irritated. That's like, oh, okay, let me start paying attention here. So when they say mood changes, usually it's irritability. Sometimes it can be weepiness. So this, I think, would be the runner up to irritability, where it's like, oh, my goodness, any little thing, I'm crying.
[05:35]
My husband just, asked me, Are you gonna do the dishes? I just burst into tears, like that type of thing. I would say that would be a runner up to irritability. Those would be the two most common mood changes. Frequent urination. We're gonna come back to this, this is a good one. Yawning, very common. This is one of mine, I will have that. Sensory sensitivity. Okay, so what do they mean by this?
[06:01]
So this is like, I'm more sensitive to noise. it's like, listen, kids, I'm gonna need you to get out of here, where normally it's like, oh, my children are playing. I just love to hear their little little voices of joy while they're played and, we're like, get out of the kitchen, so we're more sensitive to noise or light, so light sensitivity, classic one with migraine. So it's like, oh, gosh, it's so bright in here.
[06:26]
The kitchen lights are really starting to bother me. I'm trying to drive and, the sunlight bouncing off the car roofs and so on are really irritating me. The light seems brighter. So we're reaching for sunglasses, maybe even indoors. We're shutting the blinds. This type of thing. We're just more sensitive. Sometimes people will have, like, the the skin sensitivity, like, oh, my clothing, I just feel like, oh, it's so scratchy or the tag is bothering me, or, things are too tight.
[06:58]
I don't like the waistband. Not that I'm not that I'm bloated, but it's just like I don't like that waistband on my skin, those types of sensitivities. Other sense would be taste, and sometimes people will experience changes in taste. Oh, and odors, of code the last the last sense. I mean, this is a classic, odor sensitivity. Oh, my goodness, who where's that smell coming from? Didn't anyone take out the trash?
[07:27]
everybody else is like, I don't know what you're talking about, mom. So a lot of sensory sensitivities. Food cravings, yeah, another big one. So I actually talked about one of my moments on a recent podcast where I will feel this sort of sensation in my stomach. It's documented, it's called an all-gone sensation. That's how it's documented in the symptom literature. But it's sort of like, oh, my stomach is empty and I need to eat something.
[07:56]
I need to fill my stomach with food. So that's sort of like a general craving, or salt cravings. Very, very common. sometimes sweet cravings, like getting glucose in. Okay, so those are common food cravings. Sleep disturbances. So a lot of women will notice, hmm, I'm starting to realize that before the migraine hits, a night or two, I won't sleep as well. And I can't put my finger on why.
[08:29]
It's not like I've got anything going on that would cause me to wake up in the middle of the night and worry about it. But it's like, hmm, I'm starting to see a pattern where before the migraine, I'm not sleeping as well. Nausea. So just like a little like upset tummy. That's a real common one too. I've definitely experienced that along with this all-gone sensation. So it's just a little, my appetite's a little low, it's just a little bit nauseous, not feeling as good.
[08:58]
Difficulty concentrating, another classic one. I hear this a lot, I know a migraine's coming on when I can't find my words, or I've gotta reread things, I gotta reread my email at work, five times to figure out what's going on here. One thing that's not listed that I would add is constipation, so a lot of women with migraines, They will start to notice very similar to the sleep disturbances.
[09:27]
They will not have a bowel movement or feeling like an incomplete bowel movement in the days leading up to the migraine. Another very, very common one. So, I would agree with this. Any of those hit for you? Pretty typical. Let's go through aura. So they're focusing on visual aura, which is definitely more common than like numbness or tingling aura. What's much more common is a classic visual aura.
[10:01]
I've had these, right? So there's a little, almost like, hmm, is there something on my glasses? Is there something in my eyes? It's just a little kind of fuzzy type thing. Something's a little bit out of focus. And then it turns into this like squiggly kaleidoscope, black and white or colored, like kind of scintillating of visual phenomenon that starts off as like a little pinprick. And then it expands in sort of like a circular or like a round, roundish type phenomenon.
[10:35]
Gets bigger and bigger and bigger. The center will clear. And so it's almost like a donut of this scintillating phenomenon that gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it gets so big that it almost like gets bigger than your eyeball. That's what it looks like to us, right? And it just kind of leaves the visual field. and people can have that with or without head pain. I would say probably more common.
[11:03]
so that people will then have head pain afterwards. So that's the classic aura, but, people can have other visual auras or visual disturbances. Some people, they'll almost go blind in half of the visual field. So it's like I can't see anything, on the right. It's like a opaque or it's, fuzzy or it's not in focus. I can't see. Or usually it's an opaque phenomenon, but sometimes people will have other colors or it'll be like black, like a blackout phenomenon in their visual field.
[11:39]
So visual disturbances can kind of run the gamut. occasionally I'll have a client with something totally unique that I haven't heard of before. But the most common is this sort of classic aura phenomenon with this scintillating, like a like a scintillating donut kind of phenomenon. extreme would be vision loss like you actually can't see. And then you can have more of like a like a sensory aura where, the right side of my body is tingling or my, left arm is tingling, or my, hands start to tingle, there's a neurological sensation going on in the body or in the skin.
[12:25]
So not everyone will have these things, but definitely these things can occur. Then we move on to the headache. Again, this is focusing on the classic migraine, which is where head pain is the fixture, so we'll stick with that. So we've got throbbing, drilling, ice pick, bursting paint. My head's gonna explode. There's a 200 pound weight on my head. Someone's stabbing me in the eye or the temple.
[12:53]
Oh, my sinuses, it's like there's an ice pick in my sinuses. So, a lot of people think of migraine as like the classic, boom, boom, boom, like a heartbeat type of throbbing, but it doesn't have to be. There's a lot of other sensations people can experience for sure. Nausea, vomiting, nasal congestion. Done a podcast on this one. Sensory sensitivity. So if you had that as a prodrome, now it's probably even worse.
[13:22]
Neck pain and stiffness. I've talked about this a lot on the podcast. They wrote giddiness. Giddiness. Now, absolutely, this can happen to people. They'll feel elated during a migraine. They'll have a giddy feeling. I would say this is not that common. More often than not, people feel foggy. They don't feel giddy. They feel foggy, and they feel extraordinarily fatigued. They can't keep their eyes open, I mean, this is one of the main differentiators between a migraine and a headache, a headache, it's unpleasant, but I can function.
[14:00]
I can walk around. My head is hurting, but I'm not that impaired. With a migraine, you're so foggy. Your head is pounding so much, you can't keep your eyes open. You're yawning and your eyes are watering. And any movement you make, you feel like, your head's gonna explode. You literally are incapacitated. So I find it interesting that they put giddy on that because I wouldn't say that that's as common.
[14:26]
If I were making this, I would put, like, fatigue, fogginess, brain fog, can't keep the eyes open. I think that's much more common. So, yeah, I mean, otherwise, insomnia so this can go either way. So some people can't sleep if they have a migraine. They are not gonna be able to This is excruciating. I feel for those people so much. On the flip side, a lot of people, they can't stay awake.
[14:57]
They can't keep their eyes open. They're down for the count. They're in bed. They cannot power through. For me, that's much more what it was like for me. I'm in bed. I'm not awake. I'm I'm passed out. So for me, from my perspective, I'd rather have that than not be able to sleep. So whenever I have a client where they are like, oh, when I have a migraine, I cannot sleep.
[15:26]
there's no way I can sleep through it. I'm like, oh, gosh, sounds terrible. But I think they, hit the high points on classic migraine. Let's go on to postdrome so postdrome again, this is what we call, the hit by the bus feeling. a lot of times, abortive medication will exacerbate this, particularly triptan will exacerbate that hit-by-a-truck feeling or the postdrome feeling, but, we've got the fatigue, the brain fog, concentration, low mood.
[15:52]
Sometimes people will have a low mood. Or some people will feel euphoric, again, as part of a postdrome. So they'll kind of get a surge or, they'll have their best mood after after the migraine. And then once the postdrome finishes up, they kind of go back to their to their baseline mood. So let's go through these symptoms. Okay, I want to tell you how these symptoms fit.
[16:23]
So if you've been listening to the podcast, if you've watched any of my free training, I would invite you to watch my free training called the 5 Steps to Healing Migraines. Naturally, I go over this in detail as well, but on a lot of podcast episodes, I've gone over this quite a bit, too. So there are three things that our body needs to feel good, to be in a state of health, to not generate migraines.
[16:48]
So when our body is generating migraines, it means that we are deficient or that there's a block or there's a barrier, there's a missing piece to, I'm gonna be honest with you, all three of these principles, by the time you have migraines, you've got a missing piece in all three of these principles, okay? So I'm gonna I want to walk through the three principles, the three things that our body needs to be in a state of health and stay in a state of health, and how these symptoms fit into each principle, hopefully this is gonna give you a lot of insight, so the first principle is we have to get the nutrients that our cells need to the cells, our cells run on nutrients.
[17:29]
They our cells are constantly doing things all all the time to keep us alive and keep us functioning. And they need nutrients, and I say nutrients, right? Everything that our body does starts with a nutrient. Some nutrients we get from our food, nutrients, some nutrients we can make, but everything starts off with nutrients. So when people say, oh, my hormones are off, well, your hormones are made with nutrients.
[18:03]
The building blocks of your hormones are nutrients, and the organ that's making the hormone, like if your ovary is making your sex hormones, your ovary has to be functioning properly, and even if it's not related to the exact steps of making your estrogen, your overall ovary is doing other things too, and it needs nutrients to function properly, and if and that's going to contribute to the proper production of your estrogen, okay?
[18:27]
So I say nutrients, right, and people say, "Well, what about hormones?" Yeah, everything starts with nutrient. I like to get back to first principles, to the foundation, and the foundation of everything is we have to have the nutrients, our cells have to have the nutrients that they need to do the stuff they need to do. And this is in the biochemistry textbook. I've got all my medical school textbooks over here, on a bookcase over here, and I've got a couple biochemistry textbooks.
[18:59]
It's like, this is documented stuff. Your medical doctor had to sit through the same biochemistry and has the same biochemistry textbooks I have, and they should know this, but it's not part of their model. I won't get on that soapbox right now. So our cells have to have nutrients to function properly. When our cells do not have the nutrients that they need, they don't just drop dead.
[19:25]
They don't just stop functioning. They adapt, they adjust, they compensate. This is a good thing. But we can't expect to feel the same if we're compensating. That's not realistic. So there are symptoms that different cells or different organs will make. We call them symptoms. You can think of them different trade-offs, different compensatory responses. We call them symptoms. there are things that we will experience, we will feel in our physical body, or we will feel as part of our mood, or our thoughts, because our cells are making this accommodation to not having the optimal environment for the work that they're trying to do, if it's related to a nutrient deficiency.
[20:14]
So let's go through all of these symptoms, and I want to pinpoint which symptoms indicate that this typical migraine sufferer has nutrient deficiency. So frequent urination, let's start with this one. We have to have adequate mineral status in our blood. Number one, several minerals like sodium and potassium and calcium, those have to be in very precise levels, or we drop dead very quickly. So our body has a lot of regulatory mechanisms to keep those minerals in particular in a very, very tight balance in the blood.
[20:58]
Just, and so it'll preferentially keep those levels up in the blood at the expense of the cellular level. So this is why a lot of blood work for mineral deficiencies doesn't really give you the picture. Because if you say, well, am I calcium deficient? You've gotta be, like, you've gotta have a big, big problem with a couple organs, like life-threatening, if your calcium is too high or too low, in your blood.
[21:28]
Your body is going to keep those levels in your blood where they need to be, because it's incompatible with life, if they're not. But that doesn't mean your bones have adequate calcium. Your body is gonna sacrifice your bones to keep you alive in the next 15 minutes, because that calcium level in the blood has to be at a certain level. So this is where looking for the symptoms, knowing how to interpret the symptoms is very valuable, because the blood testing is not gonna get us there.
[21:55]
So frequent urination. So what are the kidneys doing? The kidneys are monitoring mineral levels in the blood. And if they start to get low, the kidneys say, "Well, I wanna concentrate the blood. Let's concentrate the blood. I can't, I'm a kidney. I can't make her eat salt. I can't make or eat something that's mineral dense. And anyway, that's gonna take a while, 'cause we've got to get the food and eat it and digest it and get it in the blood a whole bit.
[22:27]
But right now, we're running low on minerals. So I'm gonna concentrate the blood. That will raise the relative mineral density within the body. It doesn't change the actual amount of minerals in the blood, and I'm being general, because this could be any number of minerals. So I'm just keeping it general. So it doesn't change the actual amount of minerals in the blood or in the body, but if I take water out of the blood, I'm gonna concentrate things.
[22:59]
So I'm gonna have a relative increase in the mineral concentration. So that could be really beneficial if I'm starting to get deficient, if I'm starting to run low, If I've got some cells, if I've got an organ system that needs more minerals and we're running low, if I take water out of the blood, I'm gonna concentrate the minerals. and then it's going to increase the odds that I'm gonna have more minerals get to that organ, to those cells.
[23:30]
So how do I concentrate the blood? The kidneys pull more water out and put it into your bladder and then you've got a urinate, right? So if you notice that you frequently have to urinate more before you get a migraine, everybody goes, I don't know why this happened. Why would I have to urinate? I mean, I drink the same amount of water every day. I'm so careful with my water every day because, everybody knows you gotta stay hydrated, right?
[24:02]
That's what your body's trying to do. It's starting to go, uh-oh, okay, we need some more minerals here. we're getting a little low, let's concentrate things. We gotta concentrate things, we gotta get rid of some water, we gotta make some more urine, okay? A lot of migraine sufferers, I've talked about this on the podcast too, they're drinking too much water. If you're not feeling well, you probably have nutrient deficiencies, including mineral deficiencies.
[24:29]
And then we tell migraine sufferers to drink a gallon of water a day, like we're exacerbating the problem. So that's a highlight for that symptom. Yawning. Let's talk about yawning. When you have a toxin overload in your body, you're going to get foggy. You're going to yawn. You're going to want to bring in more oxygen. It's a vital element. Our metabolism requires oxygen. So it's like I've got a toxin overload.
[24:57]
I got to get things running here faster. I I need more oxygen. That can drive yawning. Yawning increases oxygen into the body. Now, the other factor here is when you have a toxin overload in your body, you're gonna feel foggy. You're gonna feel tired. You're going to have brain fog. You're gonna have difficulty concentrating. You're gonna have difficulty finding your words. What happens to people if they go out on a Saturday night and they overdo it with alcohol.
[25:34]
How do they feel when they wake up the next morning? They're hung over. Are they waking up fresh? No, they're yawning. Where's my coffee? Right, I'm yawning. Oh, right, I'm foggy. What did you say, right? I want you to think about the symptoms of a hangover. If someone has a hangover, they don't go, I don't know why I'm so foggy. They go, whew, I really poisoned myself last night.
[26:03]
Migraine is a hangover without the alcohol. A lot of your classic migraine symptoms, they're toxicity symptoms. What has happened to the person who's experiencing a migraine, someone who has chronic migraines, we have an overload of metabolic waste material and toxins within the body. This is what I call the second principle, okay? So once our cells get the nutrients that they need to function and do their work, they do their, they make the hormone, they make the enzyme, they make the protein molecule, the peptide molecule, all of those processes generate waste material.
[26:48]
You could call them toxins. I like to call them metabolic waste material to distinguish them from environmental toxins. When we hear environmental toxins, we think of man-made toxins that we've poisoned the environment with. But again, there are plenty of naturally occurring toxic substances in the environment, right? So even before we had the technology to poison the earth, there were still a lot of poisonous things naturally occurring on the planet.
[27:21]
So between our own body making waste material and us living on a planet with poisonous substances on it, we have the capacity to clear these toxin molecules. Your liver does most of the work. Other organs can do this too. Other cells can do this too. But your liver, main organ that's doing it. So when I talk about this, I generally talk about the liver. If your liver cannot keep up with the load, that happens on that Sunday morning, your liver couldn't keep up with the load of alcohol that you put into your body.
[27:56]
Now, you don't have to drink to overload your body, okay? If your liver doesn't have what it needs, 'cause your liver needs nutrients to run the detoxification pathways to clear these molecules, again, you can read about that in any biochemistry textbook or physiology textbook, and you have to have enough cellular energy in the liver to run those pathways as well. And when I talk about cellular energy, that's the third thing our body needs.
[28:24]
So what happens to people is they start to develop deficiencies in the first principle and the third principle, and then their liver slows down. And then the toxins pile up, the metabolic waste material piles up. It's like you drank alcohol the night before, but you didn't drink alcohol the night before. So let's go through all of the toxicity symptoms on this list. So mood changes. Is the hungover person a happy person?
[28:54]
They're highly irritable. Irritability is a toxicity symptom. The stereotype of the hungover person, is they're snapping at everybody. Will you shut up? Will you shut the curtains? That's the stereotype of the hungover person. They're not pleasant. Their mood has changed. Now, what examples did I just give? Who opened the curtains? It's so bright in here. Oh my goodness, where are my sunglasses? Do you ever watch The Real Housewives on Bravo?
[29:22]
I've certainly watched that show. They take the housewives out, they take 'em to Vegas, they take 'em to France, they take 'em wherever. They over-consume the next morning. Erika Girardi always has sunglasses on. I think she's, I'm speculating, just watching the show, but I think she's a migraine sufferer. I think actually she has talked about having migraines while they're filming, but she's always there in the morning with those sunglasses on.
[29:47]
because the hungover person, the person with a toxin overload, they're very sensitive to sensory input, sensory sensitivity, people. The light, the noise, the odor. Does the hungover person wake up? Oh, who's cooking eggs? Who's, a lot of, like a hungover person, they don't even want to smell bacon. Everybody loves to smell a bacon. You're hypersensitive to odors in that hungover state. You're irritable, you don't feel good, oh, my skin.
[30:18]
You're experiencing all of those same sensory sensitivity symptoms that migraine sufferers experience. Food cravings, what do hungover people want? Salty and fatty, that's what they want. What do migraine sufferers want? They want the McDonald's french fries with extra salt. What does a hungover person want? Caffeine, where's my coffee? What does the migraine sufferer want? Caffeine, they want the Coca-Cola with the McDonald's french fries, or they're using the coffee medicinally.
[30:55]
They put it in Excedrin. Caffeine speeds your liver up. It makes those detoxification pathways run faster. If you can get them running faster, maybe we can get this bucket drained. Maybe we can get these toxins out of here faster. nausea, when you have a toxic is the is the hungover person nauseous? They're literally in the bathroom vomiting, just like the migraine sufferer. Okay when you have a toxin overload, your body says, how do I get this overload out of here?
[31:20]
Maybe I can vomit some of it up. Maybe I can have some of it go out the other end, they don't have diarrhea on this list, but they could, so, are you seeing the similarities here. Difficulty concentrating. A throbbing head pain. The hungover person. My head is killing me. They literally, they got a bag of peas on their head. Nasal congestion. I've talked about this on the podcast so many times.
[31:52]
Nasal congestion is a toxicity symptom. Neck pain, stiffness, any sort of muscle pain and stiffness. I've talked about fibromyalgia and how that is also a a toxicity syndrome, just like migraines are. Our muscles are stiff and our painful, our joints are stiff. That's because of the toxin overload, sort of lodging in the joints and in the muscles and causing that stiffness and pain. When you get a massage, what do they tell you to do?
[32:20]
Make sure you drink a lot of water today. Why do they tell you that? Because when you get a massage, they're squeezing your muscles and they're literally squeezing stored toxins out of your muscles, putting them back into your bloodstream. This is notorious for migraine sufferers. I can't get a massage anymore because every time I get a massage, I get a migraine afterwards. A body that's overloaded with metabolic waste material and toxins, our body doesn't want this stuff in our bloodstream, so it pulls it out of the bloodstream and stores it in our adipose tissue, in our fat cells, in our muscles, in our joints.
[32:55]
These are the first storage spots. Why? Because these are tissue. They're not that important or they're not that metabolically active. If I'm going to put a toxic substance and store it somewhere to get it out of my bloodstream where it's doing, damage, I want it out of circulation, where can I put this? Because my liver can't handle it right now. I got to put it somewhere. Well, if I put it in my pancreas or my eyeball, that's a vital organ.
[33:20]
And these toxin molecules, they damage stuff. So I don't want to put it in my eyeball and damage my retina. I'm gonna put in my fat cells because it's not that your fat cells don't do anything, they do, but it's not like your eyeball or your pancreas. It's not that vital of an organ. So same thing with the muscles and the joints, right? If I've got to put it somewhere, I rather put it there then in, in my spleen or something like that.
[33:45]
What else do we have here? We We talked about the difficulty concentrating, the fatigue, the brain fog, depression. So most of the symptoms that are migraine symptoms are toxicity symptoms. And how do you know that? Think about what a hangover feels like. Isn't it very similar to a migraine? Yes, it's very similar to a migraine. But when we over-consume alcohol, nobody goes, "How'd this happen?" But when we get a migraine, everybody goes, "I must have a chronic disease."
[34:23]
It's like, no, you have a toxin overload that your body can't deal with right now because you got deficient in the other two principles. This is very important. I have a lot of clients say, oh, do I just have like a weak liver? Is my liver just, like not very good? It's like, well, your liver doesn't have what it needs to function at a hundred percent. So it's functioning at 70% is better than nothing.
[34:49]
What do you expect it to do? Now, let's look at the interictal phase. Now, the more chronic migraines become, the more symptoms people have in this phase. So for most people, when the migraines first start, they're having a migraine attack. The migraine attack is an acute overload of toxins. I like to think that we have sort of like this little toxin bucket inside of us, like this trash can, and we're continuously putting trash in the bucket.
[35:25]
And there's a drain at the bottom of the bucket that drains it so that it doesn't overflow. Like your bathtub, all right, you turn the tap on in the bathtub, you always have some water in the bathtub. You turn that tap on, and there's always some water in the bottom of the tub, but the drain keeps up with the water coming in so that the bathtub overflow, unless you have a hair clog.
[35:48]
So you have a hair clog in there, and it's like, oh, slowly, slowly, slowly, that bathtub is starting to fill up. Uh-oh, now it's over spilling and it's coming down in the living room. That's what a migraine attack is. Our toxin bucket was increasing, increasing, increasing, increasing, and poof, it over spilled. It tipped over. The trash spilled out all over the floor. That's what the migraine attack is.
[36:16]
Now, the migraine goes away when the toxin load comes down in the blood. And so during that attack, your liver is trying to sweep everything up. We're gonna mop all this up. We're gonna get it all up. And once that process is complete, the migraine lifts. Whether you take medication or not, the migraine lifts when all of that trash is mopped up. Now, the bucket is never empty.
[36:42]
We're continuously putting stuff in there. So, okay, it's spilled out. I got it mopped up. I feel better. Oh that was a rough couple days. But now I feel good. I'm back to normal. I'm totally fine now. I'm gonna live my life. I don't really think about it anymore. But that bucket, if the drain is a little bit clogged, if the liver can't keep up with the load or the influx, then the bucket, just like the bathtub, is going to slowly, slowly, slowly start to fill up again.
[37:11]
And eventually, it's gonna overspill again, and we're gonna get a migraine. And we're gonna say, how did that happen? I've been eating so carefully, I've been managing my stress so well, how did this happen? We're gonna go through this whole thing again. When it becomes more and more chronic, that bucket is filling up faster between attacks. Most women, when they first start getting migraines, they're getting a migraine a couple times a year.
[37:36]
So, that's how long it's taking for the bucket to fill up in between the acute attack, taking a few months. But because they don't realize that this whole process is getting set off, because they've got blockers or deficiencies or missing pieces, within these three principles, nothing's addressed, and the liver continues to get slower and slower. And so, the bucket fills faster and faster, and the migraines come quicker and quicker.
[37:59]
If you start taking medication, you're adding toxins to the system. Everybody knows that medication is toxic and has to be cleared by the liver and the kidneys. I don't think I'm going out on a limb saying this. I think people are aware of this. So, how many people say, my migraines really got worse when I started taking medication? When I was just taking Advil, I wasn't getting them that frequently, but I finally got that triptan prescription, and then my migraines really took off.
[38:23]
So, the more chronic the migraines become, the faster that bucket is filling up, and you're going to experience on a day-to-day basis more and more toxicity symptoms. And that's what they're describing in the interictal phase. So, that time period between attacks, if your three principles are fairly good, and the bucket spills over and it takes a couple months for that bucket to fill back up and spill over again and generate another attack, that's going to be a long period of time between the migraine attack or flare, and you're not going to have a lot of symptoms during that period of time because your bucket isn't that full.
[39:04]
But, as as things pile up, that period of time between flares gets shorter and shorter, and people don't feel good. They feel worse and worse during that period of time. So, they're not actually in the migraine attack. The bucket hasn't actually like spilled over and everything goes all over on the floor, but they don't feel good, right? So, this is where you know now right I'm 40, and oh my goodness, you know if I'm not in a migraine.
[39:40]
You know used to me when I was you know when I was in my 20s, I would get a migraine, I bounced back, I wouldn't think about it until the next one in a couple months. You know those are the days now, oh my goodness, I feel you know 70 instead of 40. And oh you know I just get out of a chair and everything hurts. And you know I'm just like I'm just always on my last nerve.
[40:02]
You know my poor kids. I love them to death, and I wish I weren't so irritable with them, But I can't help it. They drive me crazy with their noise, right, you know You know, I just wish I had the mental clarity I had 15 years ago or you know two years ago, right, you know, it's like, I can't find my keys, You know, I don't remember stuff.
[40:22]
I'm really starting to get worried. Am I gonna get Alzheimer's, right? These are all toxicity symptoms or nasal congestion. This I mean How many chronic migraine sufferers have nasal congestion on a chronic basis? We've talked about this on the podcast. It's one of the more common things. nasal congestion, your body is generating a nasal discharge to assist Your liver, because your liver is overloaded and it's like, how can I flush this out?
[40:52]
Let me flush it out with a nasal discharge. We've talked about this on other podcasts. So that what they're calling that interictal phase, right? You don't feel good. You feel worse and worse and worse. And the chronic migraine suffer if they're not having an actual migraine, They're still not feeling that good. They're not. They're they're not their best. They're foggy and they're fatigued and their body hurts and they're kind of nauseous.
[41:12]
I mean, what do they say? Lingering symptoms. Where's that coming from, the Migraine World Summit would have you believe that you have a chronic condition and that these this is just part Of the chronic condition. This is actually what's going on. This is the biochemistry and the physiology behind what's going on during a migraine attack and in between The flare. That's what's going on. That's why you feel so so poorly.
[41:42]
Most of those symptoms are toxicity symptoms. there are other symptoms on this list that are associated with the first principle, not getting the nutrients to the cells. Aura. Aura symptoms, visual aura or these sensory type aura symptoms, these neurological symptoms, those are nutrient deficiencies at the cellular level. Food cravings. Sometimes they're related to the toxin overload, but if you're deficient in minerals, guess what? You're gonna want salty stuff.
[42:12]
I mean, this is well documented, in the medical literature even. You're gonna have food cravings. If you're mineral deficient, your body is gonna want you to eat pretzels, chips, french fries, whatever it takes. Not that salt has every mineral in it, but the body's like minerals, minerals, minerals, salt, salt, salt. Or if you're low in vitality, you're gonna crave glucose. Glucose, you can easily get that into your bloodstream.
[42:41]
Hopefully you can easily get it into your cells. Some people have difficulty getting into their cells, and that's gonna drive glucose craving. So food craving, people are not craving broccoli. They're craving sugar, and they're craving salty stuff. So if that's you, it's indicating vitality or nutrient deficiencies. Mood changes. Again, we have to have the nutrients we need to make our neurotransmitters. Hello! We don't make neurotransmitters out of Starbucks frappuccinos and unicorn dust.
[43:17]
So when people have, issues with mood, it can be related to nutrient deficiencies. With insomnia, We've got to produce the hormones that are required for sleep. Again, how do we make those hormones? They start with nutrients and proper cellular energy within the cell that's making the hormone. And then if we're going to make stuff, if we've got a factory, we make our little widget, there's going to be like scrap material.
[43:42]
You're making something in a factory. There's like scrap material that's left over. That's metabolic waste material. You can't just like throw that on the factory floor and say, okay, well, we'll just keep making widgets. Every night, you've got to clean the factory out. You can't just leave all of those waste materials laying all over the factory. Same thing with your cells. You've got to get the waste material out of the cells and out of the body.
[44:12]
So I hope that this helps. I was talking about your sleep hormones, insomnia. It's like even to make your, the hormones that are associated with your sleep cycle, you've gotta have the nutrients to make those hormones. You gotta have them available at the time that your cell is trying to make it. If it's like 8 p.m. And your body wants to start making melatonin so that you can actually fall asleep in a few hours, if you don't have the nutrients required to make that melatonin at that moment in time, like you don't just drop dead, but you're not gonna have optimal hormonal signaling in those conditions.
[44:49]
And if there's a bunch of trash all over the place, the cell's like, well, I'm trying to make this, but I mean, there's no room in here. It's like, there's trash all over the place. It's not gonna be optimal. The widget that the factory makes, if there's a whole bunch of trash all over the place, it's not gonna be the best widget. And then you have to have cellular energy.
[45:07]
We gotta have power to the factory. We don't, it's like you have to have power to power everything within the factory. You have to have that intracellular energy or vitality so that things run. So ultimately, you could make the case that every symptom that we experience, it comes down to a deficiency or a block or a missing piece within all three of the principles. You can definitely make that case, but there are certain symptoms that are much more characteristic for one principle, over another, okay?
[45:42]
So I hope this is helpful for you, like I say, and you know, if we're gonna do these types of infographics where we're focusing on symptoms, this is what I would like us to focus on, what the symptoms actually mean, and how we can stop feeling the symptoms, how we can help our body not generate the symptoms, not just this sort of like, hashtag migraine awareness, And here's how horrible it is to have a migraine.
[46:07]
There's an educational component to it. I can appreciate that a lot of people out there, they spend years thinking that they have sinus infections. A lot of women will spend years and years and years until they're finally told, "Oh, I think this might be migraine." So, in that sense, it's helpful for people to see the symptoms and kind of, oh, wait a minute, this actually might be me.
[46:31]
This might not be, sinus infection. This might be migraine. okay, great, I can get on board with that, but there's nothing here that points people to the solution. It's more, just hashtag purple ribbon stuff, and I'm not on board with that. So thanks for joining me today. I hope this was helpful for you to kind of decipher these symptoms and give you some insight into what's driving this.
[46:56]
So, when I work with my clients, this is the first thing that we do. We go through all of their symptoms, not just their migraine symptoms, but all of the symptoms that their body's generating. But most people are like, yeah, I don't really have anything going on except my migraines. It's like, nope, you got a lot more going on. We flush everything out and tie it back to, okay, this is what this symptom is telling us about where you have a deficiency or a blocker or a missing piece, and then we know what to target.
[47:25]
That allows me to go in like a laser, right? So many of you have been recommended fistfuls of supplements to take by natural practitioners. That's not laser, right? That's spaghetti on the wall. That's, oh, you got migraines, so we're gonna give you CoQ10. I'm looking at all of your symptoms, connecting all of the dots back to what it tells us about where your particular status is within these three principles, and then we can go in like a laser.
[47:54]
And that means you're not taking fistfuls or supplements. You know, you're doing relatively little things, Within the natural medicine space, everybody's doing 50 capsules per day, 10 capsules with every meal before bedtime, between meals, all this stuff. Nobody can keep track of it. It's hundreds of dollars a month. Laser focused is, what's one thing we could do that's gonna hit more than one principle with this. That's what I'm looking for.
[48:20]
And then we're just going in like a laser and adjusting and tweaking and doing what we need to fill in those gaps. And then when we do that, your body responds. That's a miracle of our bodies. We are always so hard on our bodies, like, my body hates me, my body has to hate me, why else would it be generating these migraines? Your body doesn't hate you.
[48:43]
It's doing the best it can in conditions or an environment that's not suboptimal. Could be a little bit of better environment, but it's doing the best that it can. That's the miracle of our body. We don't just drop dead if there's, like, one thing that's missing. We adapt, we compensate. But there's a cause to that, and we call those symptoms. So thanks again so much. Thanks so much for joining me today, and I will talk to you soon.
[49:09]
There's no shortage of triggering material for me on social media, so you will see me soon. Bye bye, everybody.
