Common Triggers for Migraines and How Chiropractic Care Can Help
Are you struggling to find the source of your migraines?
Have you tried everything Google suggests for relief, but nothing has helped?
Wondering if a chiropractor can help alleviate your migraines?
Many people think migraines are just "bad headaches" or assume you have to have extreme symptoms for them to be considered migraines. Neither is true.
Migraines are much more complex than headaches.
What are Some Migraine Symptoms?
While migraines are typically associated with more pain than ordinary headaches, that isn't their only distinction. Migraines are often accompanied by a throbbing or pulsing feeling, nausea, elevated heart rate, visual changes, and many other symptoms.
What Causes Migraines?
Migraines can be caused by lots of things - spinal issues, diet, exercise, stress, and more. The key is getting to the root of your specific migraines. The things that cause migraines – “triggers” – are things you can avoid to alleviate the frequency and intensity of your migraines.
Identifying the Source of Your Migraines
The first step when identifying the cause of your migraines is to keep detailed logs. You should Track things that might commonly help or hinder migraines for a period of 60 days. Logging your lifestyle will help you understand what might be leading to your migraines and give you clues as to what to avoid.
Here are the things you should be tracking:
- Detailed Diet
- Exercise
- Stress levels
- Sleep Duration and Quality
- Menstrual Cycle
- The phase of the moon if none of the others helped.
When you start to track factors in your lifestyle, it is important to know that symptoms don't necessarily arise directly after exposure or contact with something specific. If a migraine starts at 8:00 pm, you can't just look at what you ate for dinner. The quality of your life and expression of symptoms in many cases can be influenced by anything from the last 72 hours. This makes understanding causes and triggers more difficult, but also opens up the opportunity to understand how your body processes it's stress and environment better.
What We Find Works for Most Migraines
While migraines can be tricky to understand and live with, two factors are often overlooked – spinal problems and neurological effects.
In most cases, there are one or more subluxations present in the spine, commonly the neck. A subluxation is when a bone is misaligned, doesn't move properly, and affects nearby nerves. By removing these areas of stress and pressure, we can restore movement, improve curves, and most importantly, reduce/remove migraines.
When a spinal subluxation exists, it impacts movement and diminishes the nerves’ communication in that area. This alone typically improves migraines by 50% within 12 visits and 75% or greater within 24 visits with our patients.
Understand Your Migraines in Ann Arbor with The Bridge Chiropractic
If you have tracked your life, avoided common triggers, and can't seem to understand your migraines in Ann Arbor, there may be underlying issues in your spine and nervous system.
At our office, we don’t guess what’s wrong. We do full spine X-rays, perform a thorough analysis of your spine every visit, and perform a 3-part neurological scan to understand your individual case. Additionally, for most migraine cases, we do an additional X-ray of the neck bending forward and backward. This allows us to pinpoint the exact vertebra that are problems and understand how to correct them.
Schedule a visit to take your first step on the path of recovery.
Definition from the Doctor!
Range of Motion: This is how far you can bend, twist, and move without extra help or effort.
If you can't turn your head while driving to see out your passenger window, you have a limited "range of motion."