Medicine Doesn’t Work…

What it means when your doctor says there’s nothing wrong even though you have severe headaches.

So, we don’t treat headaches as a medical problem. But there is pain…lots of it and what do doctors do to alleviate pain? They prescribe medicine.

Doctors don’t understand what causes headache pain and the particular kind of pain it is, so the medication they prescribe ends up having little or no affect. Or it works for awhile and then unexpectedly quits.

Pain medicine works best when there is an acute event, like a broken leg or a dental extraction. In these examples pain medication works to reduce your discomfort while healing. Chronic headaches result from tense muscles that are unable to relax and are not the result of a one time event.

The mechanism that causes headaches repeats over and over again because the underlying cause is never dealt with.

So if pain medicine gives relief it is only temporary. You may also be prescribed a ‘muscle relaxant’ that may help but is not completely effective. If you have migraines you may be prescribed a variant of sumatriptan that narrows the blood vessels in the brain. This can be helpful to stop a severe migraine but doesn’t help prevent the next one. What most people don’t know is muscle tension is a major trigger of migraines. That same muscle fatigue that causes tension headaches also stimulates migraines. Just like a small detonator can create a large explosion!

In our decades of treating tension, mixed and migraine headaches we have never seen a medication make the changes in chronically tense muscles necessary to prevent headaches.

But everyone continues to take medicine after medicine because it’s the current treatment protocol and there are few other options.

Understanding the pain is from the compromised muscles we know trigger your headaches is where the solution lies. Seem impossible the answer is about muscles?

To learn more about how clenching is indicated in chronic headaches download the free guide, Beyond Relief…Prevention. Questions and comments welcome here!