Be in Control of Your Headache Relief

There is something really freeing about being in control. Not the 'dig in your heels, holding on for dear life' kind of control, but control that comes from knowing how to make something happen.

If you have chronic headaches your life is out of control.

Ever notice that most medical treatment for headaches revolves around the newest drug or a defective gene? Or you treat them by going to a health practitioner to get massaged, adjusted or get acupuncture? What all these modalities have in common is that something or someone is doing it to you. What if the newest drug stops working? Or, now you find out you have a defective gene? Or, you are in Italy and your massage therapist is in Idaho? These things are helpful, but the problem is that you need someone outside yourself to provide relief!

Unfortunately, the point of view that you can't deal with what ails you is everywhere. Just take a look some night at the tone of commercials on prime time TV. A great majority of them are directed at some problem you need to get rid of by taking medication.

Can't sleep? Take a pill.
Indigestion? Take a pill.
Can't eat dairy products? Take a pill.
Headache? Take a pill.
Arthritis pain? Take a pill.
Depressed? Take a pill.

Now, I am not suggesting that we should never take anything for pain. But if you chronically can't sleep, or everything you eat gives you indigestion, or you have headaches all the time...SOMETHING MIGHT BE CAUSING IT THAT YOU CAN CHANGE.

Most people who don't have headaches and even those that do, don't realize how much headaches control their lives. A great example comes to mind.

I will call her Harriet. Harriet came to me with a chronic headache history that went back 30 years starting when she was a teenager. Currently, she had a job she didn't like just so she could keep the health benefits that paid for the expensive headache drug Imitrex. She used it to treat her headaches AFTER the pain was unbearable. Because overuse of the drug can cause rebound headaches, she was caught in a vicious cycle of causing her headaches with the very thing that was supposed to relieve them. She came to our program because she was only allowed to use 9 shots a month by her HMO and she was using that in the first two weeks of the month! After several weeks of working together her headache pattern began to change. At midway in the process she was not taking the Imitrex but admitted that she was stockpiling the medication in case she needed it. Clearly, she hadn't realized that SHE had something to do with the headaches....yet. By the end of our work together she began to see that she had constellated her whole life around the certainty she would have headaches and her need for medication to stop the pain. It was a great session in which she realized that she could actually look for a job that she really wanted and plan activities in advance because she was so confident with what she had learned. She was now in control.

But there are requirements.
• YOU have to do something in your own behalf.
• YOU have to take on learning a new skill.
• YOU have to make changes in you lifestyle.

But once you learn to do these things, the knowledge belongs to you and it is available anytime day or night no matter where you are.

So, take the plunge...what have you got to lose but your headaches!