Living A Full Life

Headache Solutions for a Healthier You

• Full Life Chiropractic • Season 3 • Episode 10

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Unlock the secrets to a headache-free life as Dr. Enrico Dolcecore takes you on a journey through the intricate world of headaches and migraines. Get ready to uncover how you can take control of your well-being by understanding the five major types of headaches—tension, migraine, cluster, cervicogenic, and sinus headaches. Dr. Dolcecore provides insights into the underlying causes such as muscle tension, poor posture, and dehydration, while offering practical strategies to prevent and alleviate these conditions. From maintaining proper hydration to optimizing your workspace setup, learn how small changes can lead to big relief.

Discover how chiropractic care, especially upper cervical chiropractic adjustments, can be a game-changer for migraine sufferers, providing neurovascular benefits and reducing intensity. Explore the links between cluster headaches and hypothalamic activation, and find out how lifestyle changes and chiropractic interventions can make a difference. For those battling cervicogenic headaches, learn how proper cervical spine alignment can restore balance and improve quality of life. With a focus on improving indoor air quality and its impact on headaches, this episode promises not only immediate relief but also long-term wellness. Join us in this comprehensive exploration and take the first step towards a healthier, happier you in 2025.

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Speaker 1:

Hey everyone, welcome to another week of Living a Full Life. I'm Dr Enrico Dolcecori and this week we're going to be tackling headaches and migraines. We've done one podcast in the past, probably about 14 months ago. We're going to dive deeper into headaches, the causes, the physiological effects, the physical effects and how they develop, so that you have a greater understanding of how headaches and migraines come along, so that maybe you can prevent them from happening at all. Pretty cool, when we talk about health and prevention, it's really the only logical way to pursue health and wellness is your. Health is not something you acquire. It's something that's given to you. It's your job to maintain that. It's a sacred gift that's given to you to maintain your health over time. And the best healthcare is prevention. For sure, you prevent anything, you mitigate risks, you mitigate any types of causes and you save yourself a lot of hassle and you save yourself from disease. I always love the definition of hyphenating the word disease and making it hyphenated because the body works at ease, naturally. If you look at a baby, a child, and how they can run around and fall and bounce back and eat anything they want and sleep. Well, that's the body at ease. It sleeps, it regenerates, it gets up, it has full of vigor and energy and when we create any type of turmoil in that ease, you get dis-ease the hyphenated version of that. I love teaching that aspect of health because it makes perfect sense. When the body starts to get dis-ease, it's not at ease anymore. That's where things start to brew, symptoms start to develop and then we can fall into the full disease, where you move the hyphen and it becomes pathological. Something happens, a symptom happens, an organ starts to function differently, our blood work starts to change, and then we start labeling pathologies on these things. Prevention is such a better journey to take when it comes to health. So let's talk about headaches. Um, the types of headaches. You know there's there's five major categories of headaches and we'll go through each one of them in detail and we want to look at their underlying causes and their physiological basis so that we can understand how they work and then figure out how we can address them, if we get them, and how, more importantly, prevent them from ever happening. So the five types that we're going to go through is tension headaches, migraine headaches, cluster headaches, cervicogenic headaches and sinus headaches. Those are the five. There's nine if you break them down, the types of migraines, like with aura, without aura. But those are the five categories of headaches and when I help patients come in, those are the questions I ask Where's the headache, how often do you get it, what part of your head does it affect and how long does it last? Then you can narrow it down to which type of headache it is. Then, when you know your neurology, the brain, the dura mater and the spinal column, you then can deduce where these things are coming from, why the irritation is happening. Is it chemical, physical or emotional? And we break these things down from a doctor's perspective. Pretty cool, right? So that's how we're going to go through all of this today.

Speaker 1:

So let's start with tension headaches tension headaches. The characteristics of tension headaches is that they're dull. That's a key thing. They're dull, they're not sharp, they're not poking anyone in the eye, they're not doing anything like that. They're dull, aching and often a tight band around the head or on one side of the head, or maybe just the front of the head or the back of the head. But think of it like a band, like a headband, like a tennis player that's on too tight. It can affect all the way around, or just a portion of the head and it's dull and aching more of a tension type feeling, hence the tension headaches. Aching more of a tension type feeling, hence the tension headaches. So these are usually related to muscle tension and stress leading up to that muscle tension and trigger points around the neck and head that can last or develop and causing these types of headaches. So they're more muscular. Believe it or not, those are headaches.

Speaker 1:

The causes are poor posture, that's number one. The causes are poor posture that's number one Across the board. When we help diagnose patients that come in with tension headaches, posture plays a major role in almost 100% of them. Kids, typically young children, don't get tension type headaches. They'll get more of a cluster. We'll talk about that in a second Posture, stress, eye strain and dehydration being the four major causes of tension headaches. So how do we prevent these things? Well, reverse, engineer this, stay hydrated, monitor your screen time For sure.

Speaker 1:

I know many of us work at a desk full time and a computer or screens or tablets or desktops or laptops, and those hours add up. We truly have to mitigate and create ergonomics that work for us so that we can work for whatever company we work for, for ourselves, whatever it is in front of these computers, and the key here is blue screens, screen covers for eye strain, using dark mode, figuring out the lighting in the room, figuring out what eases your body to work in those conditions for hours upon hours. That's the key when it comes to ergonomics Having the monitor set up. When you look at it, when you sit at 90 degrees in your chair, with your back against the chair, your feet on the floor, your knees bent at 90 degrees, your arms are at 90 degrees on the table, on the keyboard, everything's set up properly. The monitor comes all the way up until when you're looking straight ahead. You're looking at the center of the monitor. Think of it like a bullseye on the monitor. You keep that there keeps the head in a neutral position, almost like your chin's up a little bit. That's the key.

Speaker 1:

Many of us work on laptops. Our chins are tucked down, we look forward and this is what develops trigger points in the neck which can lead to tension headaches. Everyone comes in with sore and tight traps. They do massages, they temporarily help. The headaches keep coming back. We're getting these things two, three times a week. It's high.

Speaker 1:

So one of the questions I ask my patients when they come in I'm like what do you think the normal amount? So they'll tell me their frequency. They'll say I get these twice a week and I'll say what's a normal amount of headaches people should get? And they think it's a trick question. I think most people understand the answer. They just don't say it because they think it's a trick question and they'll say, oh, I don't want some one. I say never, you're never supposed to get a headache. How often is your elbow supposed to swell up in your life? And then they get it. They're like, oh, I don't think it's ever supposed to swallow, right, never, never supposed to have symptoms. So there's no normal amount of headaches. When people say, oh, I get the normal amount or I get a regular amount of headaches, I'm like that's irregular, very irregular. The last headache I had was when I was sick, and the time before that was probably five years ago. So those things headaches shouldn't happen, right.

Speaker 1:

So eye strain. Hence we talked about the monitors, getting your eyes checked annually. Over the age of 30, you should be getting your eyes checked annually because your prescription can change a little bit. Even a quarter of a point can really create eye strain, especially for nearsighted people. Nearsighted people can see near easier, but farsight can change and those prescriptions can actually change month to month. They can change year to year, for sure. And then with women, hormone changes can change things as well. That's why, over the age of 40, for both men and women, we get a change in eyesight or prescription because of hormone changes. Unfortunately, that's one thing that happens. So, getting your eyes checked, creating good ergonomics, staying hydrated and correcting our posture and always working on our posture, we live with a head forward posture. Many of us because of desks, tablets, our phones, writing, we're just looking down a lot. So doing the opposite is great Rolling up a towel, lying down flat on the floor on a yoga mat, looking at the ceiling, with that towel right underneath your neck, rolled up to about four to six inches in diameter, depending on your height.

Speaker 1:

I usually tell people put your hands together, your index finger and your thumb on both hands, put it together, create that circle. That's the diameter of that towel, nice and tight right underneath. Lie on it for 15 minutes, one, five. It takes about five minutes to just relax. Once you relax, you get 10 minutes of almost a decompressive state with a curve in your neck, putting the curve in the right direction where it's almost making you look like you're looking upward, your chin goes up. That's the curve development that we want in the neck to prevent tension headaches. Okay.

Speaker 1:

Moving on to migraine headaches these are categorized as more intense headaches. Moving on to migraine headaches these are categorized as more intense headaches. Throbbing pain, often on one side, can come with light sensitivity, the back of the head. So that's a migraine headache. The physiology behind it is a little different. It's not trigger points. These are neurovascular changes that happen in the brain. Inflammation and serotonin imbalance can also play a role there too. So they're inflammatory pain receptors in the brain and it's because of neurovascular changes. Nerve stress, nerve irritation can change the vasodilation of arteries as far as how much they pump blood into the brain and venous return on how much they exited. And if we build up any type of tension in that pressure it can create migraine type headaches. Nerve irritation alone can create a migraine and then any type of inflammation. Maybe we just ate some bad food, we got into some global inflammation in the body and then serotonin imbalances. This is where mood can affect and where stress can highly affect neurovascular changes in the brain as well and that's where we get the dopamine changes and serotonin changes in the brain which can cause migraines as well, leading to more of a neurotransmitter type issue here. So hormones, foods, stress and sensory triggers are what cause migraines.

Speaker 1:

If you're susceptible to migraines, you know this and you've probably learned how to live with them. Many of the patients that come in with migraines have this like protocol when they know a migraine is coming. If they can do these A and B things before the migraine is full blown, they can mitigate it or reduce its symptoms. But they know that if they cross that point there's nothing they can do, nothing that they can take. No extra strength, tylenol, no NSAIDs, no Excedrin is going to touch it. They're just going to have to go through it. And I feel poorly for these patients because some of them are like it lasts a couple hours to a few days. I'm like, oh my gosh, how do you go days with these migraines? So these can be debilitating. It can really reduce productivity. If you're a parent trying to take care of your kids, if you're working, it's going to reduce your productivity because you're just in chronic pain. So migraines are a different category.

Speaker 1:

There, when we help patients. We get such great results, especially with upper cervical chiropractic care when it comes with migraines, because we have an immediate neurovascular change with the adjustment. That decreases pressure in the brain and then can ultimately affect the hormone changes as well. People just get relaxed immediately after upper cervical adjustment, which reduces that stress response. I think that's why we get such great results with it. So people who get migraines weekly will go down to getting migraines maybe once a year under care. That's an amazing thing there. So that's how we get the neurovascular. Things that we can do at home is just making sure you know, keeping on top of your hormones after the age of 40, just staying on top of them, knowing what your normal ranges are and making sure you stay within that. And if you start to escalate or deescalate in estrogen, testosterone, whatever it is, maybe talking to your doctor and seeing how you can mitigate that or or keep it balanced.

Speaker 1:

Foods that trigger migraines Of course it sounds obvious, but sometimes they're everywhere. Sometimes people get these because of dairy or gluten or grains. Those are hard to stay away from. But if you know that certain foods do this, mitigating it is by not eating them can help reduce migraines as well. So number three is cluster headaches.

Speaker 1:

Cluster headaches are characterized as more of a severe pain around the eye typically or around the side of a temple, often in cyclical patterns or clusters. They'll happen on this side, behind the eye all of a sudden and then you'll get another headache. Maybe it moves to a different spot and you get that. The physiology behind this is that it's hypothalamic activation and abnormal nerve signaling that can cause these clusters of certain parts of the head and brain to get irritated, so that hypothalamic activation means that we are getting sleep cycle disturbances or we're getting into typically chemical irritation from some type of exterior source. Usually the most common is alcohol and smoking that cause these types of things. But they're also seen in children when they have these types of cluster headaches and it's because of dysregulated sleep. Again, in our chiropractic offices, getting these children adjusted normalizes nerve tone in the brain and spinal column and their sleep immediately changes. And once their sleep immediately changes, their headaches get better almost immediately. It's a quick effect with these children. But what about adults that are getting cluster headaches?

Speaker 1:

It's typically because of a buildup of stress over time, hence the hypothalamic activation in the brain which is responding to constant stresses, and this is due to work. Typically, our careers will do this. The grind, the daily, weekly, monthly grind that we get sucked into it. And then you realize, man, when did I start this job? Oh, 2011. It's 2025. And 14 years have gone by. You've been doing this work and you realize that you're stuck in the cycle. So now we're getting into more stress mitigation, taking time for yourself, going for walks, changing the lifestyle a little bit to help reduce those.

Speaker 1:

And again, chiropractic care has done so well with headaches. So that's why we're doing this podcast today. I helped thousands of patients over the last 17 years with headaches. Like it's just I joke with our team all the time. The other chiropractic headaches are our bread and butter. I mean, this is easy. Somebody comes in, that's it. We can guarantee we're going to help these people just because we have such an influence on the nerve tone of the brain. It's amazing stuff. So number four so we got tension headaches, migraine headaches, cluster headaches, and now we're on to number four cervicogenic headaches.

Speaker 1:

Cervicogenic means cervical the neck, so neck causing headaches. So this is, as you can see, where we're going with this. The characteristics is that the pain originates in the neck and radiates up towards the head, not to be confused with tension headaches which can be painful along the head. We can have trigger points along our occipital, temporal muscles, our jaw. We can have trigger points develop here. Cervicogenic is that the pain is originating from the neck. The long scalene and trapezius muscles in the neck are getting way too tight and they're irritating blood flow and nerve flow back to the head. So the dysfunction in the cervical spine often involves C1, 2, and 3. Or one of them or all of them, and it's vertical, vertigogenic. So it's because of the vertebra misalignment.

Speaker 1:

This is strictly a chiropractic type therapy. For this one, people with cervicogenic headaches 100% results with chiropractic care. To get this diagnosed it's with x-rays to see the facet joints, see the malalignment, adjust them correctly. These are the fastest resolving headaches because chiropractors are all on top of that and they're not neurovascular, which becomes more complicated when things are neurovascular. So dysfunction in the cervical spine you restore function by getting proper mobilization of the joints and that they're aligned properly after a spinal manipulative therapy Works fantastic. Our upper circle technique that I do specifically is even one step above, where we align and take a CT, a panoramic CT of the neck. Look at the neck in a 3D model, see exactly what's misaligned. Use a non-rotary adjustment, meaning that your head will never turn, crack, pop, it's done, sidelined, and the adjustment is specific and fast and you just kind of sit there and chill. Afterwards the bones oscillate back into place. It can be as fast as one adjustment where people see improvements, but within a few weeks patients are back to normal with no headaches Quite life-changing for them. Again, poor posture and cervical misalignments are the cause of this. Now you're going to say well, how do you get misalignments?

Speaker 1:

Whiplash, believe it or not. When we think of whiplash we think of a car accident. Yes, those are pretty aggressive accidents. It can be from sports, from running down the basketball court and getting bumped. You guys ever body checked each other on a basketball court? Or running into someone playing soccer hockey? Of course, lots of whiplash and matt falling when you're roller skating or ice skating, slipping on the ice, slipping on the stair and catching yourself on the on the railing, that one where you jolt the back back. Maybe you're young, your older sibling pushes you from behind. You get that whip back of the head. Whiplash happens for many, many playing on the trampoline, trying some flips give. Whiplash happens for many, many playing on the trampoline trying some flips, give yourself whiplash there the way you land on your back.

Speaker 1:

Sometimes Whiplash happens more than you think and that irritation is what pulls on those neck muscles. It's a muscle injury to the neck which leads to neck pain and cervigogenic headaches. Then the last one, sinus headaches probably the most irritating ones out of there, because it's an external force that's causing all this stuff. It's a pain around the forehead, the cheeks, the nose, often with sinus pressure, and it comes with congestion. Typically, if it's allergy-based, there may not be congestion. It could just be painful and I went through one of this ever in my life and it's probably three years ago in the middle of January, and I would wake up in the morning and I would feel good. That was the best I felt for a couple hours. And as I was standing, oh my gosh, this was the worst headache I've ever experienced on the fronts. I didn't know what to do Antihistamines, antibiotics, z-pak I mean, I didn't know what was going on. Nothing was really coming out and I feel for those people. I'm like man. I hope that never happens again.

Speaker 1:

Typically environmental irritants, allergens, infections these are what happened with sinus congestions. Kids come in with this all the time. The one-year-olds, two-year-olds, three-year-olds. They're full, they're sinusy, they're grumpy because their head hurts. Again, activator adjustments or craniosacral adjustments to the skull where we mobilize a little bit of the face. There's not much movement here. It's not like a joint in the spine or your knuckles, but that slight motion and adjusting the ears. You can actually adjust the incus in the ear where you pull on the earlobes and there's a specific adjustment that opens the ears, drains the ears, prevents ear infections. In these kids they get immediate relief. The adults with sinus problems and allergies when they come in they always ask can you just do my sinuses? And we do them and they have a great day. They enjoy the day. It just clears them up for the day. It mitigates sinus headaches a little bit.

Speaker 1:

But the true prevention of this is just making sure you get your allergy testing, knowing what you're allergic to if it's environmental, like dust, pollen, ragweed making sure you have a HIPAA filter in your bedroom. In your homes you try and filter the air as much as you possibly can. Read these studies where it says in your home it's 200 times more dirty and more dusty and worse air pollution than outside. If you just step outside of your home and stand on your driveway, that's how much dirtier the air is. So, doing everything you can to filter this stuff, it's because it's stagnant. We use the HVAC that cycles the same air all around the house and it pushes dust everywhere. That's why we have carpet. You get dust in the corners, you get dust mites.

Speaker 1:

There's so many reasons as to why internal environments are a little bit worse air pollution than outside. It's because there's just not a constant flow of air movement. Make sense? That was a loaded one about headaches. Now you're all experts on headaches. You now know what to do. Yes, chiropractic was the answer for four out of five of them, hence why we did this. If you need some care, give us a call. If you don't live in the area, give us a call. We'll find upper cervical chiropractors for you. Go to uppercervicalnearmecom and you'll find some great listed upper cervical chiropractors there. The reason why I'm pushing it towards upper cervical is because it's just so powerful and such quick results for most patients with headaches and migraines. So it works absolutely great Info at fulllifetampacom. Like, share and follow us here on the podcast so that more listeners can listen to this and we can share our knowledge with more people, have a healthy and happy week and have a fantastic 2025 as well. Stay well, stay healthy, take care.

People on this episode

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Dr. Enrico Dolcecore

Host
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Dr. Christine Hafer

Co-host
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Dr. Crystal Corona

Co-host