Beating Headaches and Neck Pain

That's so wonderful that you had that experience with your patients and you were like, huh, maybe there is something to it if a lot of people are presenting with the same symptoms and then they're not really getting any relief, it sounds like.

So I want to explore that a little bit more with you because what you just mentioned was like, People are coming to you with migraines, but they're frequently being mistaken for different types of headaches.

I've heard from so many patients who have migraines or experienced migraines that they're mistaken for tension-type headaches or sometimes even sinus issues or maybe just stress-related pain.

Because, you know, the symptoms of like having that pressure around your head area right here or dizziness can like overlap.

So why are so many chronic headaches and migraines misdiagnosed or poorly managed?

Yeah, most of the diagnoses, when we look at the migraine category especially, we can get into whether it's cluster headaches, migraine with aura, without aura, what's called vestibular migraine, there's even atypical migraine.

So there's all these different categories.

that are all symptom-based, meaning that your symptoms are provided, you just describe what's happening to you, to your provider, and then the provider basically puts it into a diagnosis and gives it back to you.

But the problem there is that the diagnosis is only attached to symptoms.

It's not attached to anything objective that's like an actual underlying problem.

And so when For example, like when your friends are saying like, hey, I feel like I have migraines, but they've told me it's tension headaches.

The reason that it's important, even though they're all tied, generally they're tied to symptoms.

The reason it's important is because when... someone hears that they have a migraine diagnosis or they're communicating to a coworker or their boss or to a family member, the migraine diagnosis tends to hold a little bit more weight when it comes to understanding or communicating the disability involved.

So the debilitating nature of the symptoms.

And so when I'm looking at those diagnoses, that's part of the validity of it is like, okay, if you have this debilitating recurring migraine, this head pain, then slapping the migraine diagnosis on it is helpful in that regard.

When it comes to like the misdiagnosis portion, that's really just because we're trying to take symptoms and put them into nice packages that then guide people through our healthcare system.

And because it's not tied to anything objective, it gets kind of squishy.

And people's diagnoses are sort of like, you know, you kind of fall in one category and kind of in another.

And so without the objective anchor, it just people get lost.

They feel like they don't really know what they have.

And that's very, very common.

And so what we need to do is find the objective thing that's wrong.

And then there's clarity.

Yes.

So, yeah, that's it.