Sumatriptan

For example, one of the success stories in pain medicine is the development in the 1990s of abortive therapies for migraine headaches.

Drugs like sumatriptan, sold as Imitrex, only fail 57% of the time.

And guess what was shown to work just as well in a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial? Just an eighth of a teaspoon of ginger powder.

You can hardly tell the ginger curve from the drug curve.

If it happens again, you know, try some ... " Oh, God, my brain has died.

What's that preventative drug? Sumatriptan.

There, we got it.

Sumatriptan, you know, in the initial stages, and if it doesn't work and they're getting it recurrently, to then refer to neurology.

If it's somebody who's known migraines and this is an exacerbation and the medication they're on isn't working, then your suggested plan would be to discuss with neurology further kind of escalation of their treatment.

Um, but, and, and say, you know, "I'm not a neurologist." And I, and I, and I do s- I say this all the time to patients, like, you know, when I get to the point of, you know, I've diagnosed something, but, you know, like for example, I'm not an oncologist.

You go and you're like, oh, doctor, I've been getting migraines a lot.

They're like, oh, here, take Imitrex.

That works for almost everybody.

To me, the next question should be before the Imitrex is like, huh, what's different? What's been going on? Are you more stressed? Maybe it's not an Imitrex.

Maybe this person needs therapy.

Maybe this person needs something different nutritionally.

Around the periods, they plummet.

So that's why you're starting, if you get the headaches around then, the standard Imitrex and these other things, they don't work.

But simply giving hormone replacement in a way that you don't get the dips.

If you're on the birth control pill, I will not cycle the pill.

Let me read the tea leaves.

Is this going to be a bad enough one for my Imitrex? Could I take a naproxen? Right.

We start, we start doing that sort of reading the tea leaves is what I call it.

And do we want to burn a medication? Do we want to waste a medication? I want to address the uh-oh moment.

I hate needles.

Sumatriptan is another one of these drugs, right? And I'm not a doctor.

I'm not telling you what to do.

I'm telling you, this is how I operate.

I wonder if

those people that respond well to the Triptan class of medications, Sumatriptan, Zomig, because those could cause vasoconstriction, then are really having histamine-related type migraines.

It's

extremely possible.

Anytime you suppress symptoms, and I've talked about this on other podcasts, I have a free training dedicated to this topic that we'll link in the description.

But anytime you suppress the symptoms that your body's trying to generate, which that's, that's what you're doing with these medications, right? Everyone knows that you know, we don't have an Imitrex deficiency, right? Everybody knows when they take medication that the medication is working some, you know, biochemical magic that's suppressing the symptoms.

You know, if you're taking Phenogren for nausea, it's not, you know, you don't, you're not having nausea because you have a Phenogren deficiency, right? It's, it's suppressing the nausea, right? The Fiora set is suppressing the pain that, makes most people feel better in the short term.

But anytime that we suppress the symptoms that the body is trying to generate, the body fights that suppression.

It's called the cytochrome P450 pathway.

system it's a system of detoxification enzymes it's sort of like you know that that fisher price toy for babies and it's like that little box and you put a red circle in the red circle hole and you put a green star and the green star it's like that little sorting uh box for little babies that's what these detoxification pathways are like there's different cyp 450 enzyme systems that process differently shaped molecules.

So when you take an Imitrex or you take a Fioreset, the molecular shape of that medication is a little bit different, right? The Imitrex is shaped a little bit differently than the Fioreset.

The Imitrex is like the green star and the Fioreset is like the red circle.

We opted not for surgery.

So I got on Imitrex, right? Which is like the migraine medicine and nothing, nothing worked, nothing.

And I was down, I had never had anything, you know, there was no drug seeking behavior.

I was only in like eighth grade.