Why Migraine Medications Stop Working and What Actually Help w/ Dr. Amelia Barrett, MD + BoneCoach™ Osteoporosis & Osteopenia

What are the contributors behind migraines and headaches? And I want to talk about just, in just a minute, the general brain health, but maybe let's specifically talk about the headaches and the migraine piece, too.

too.You know, I think there are a couple of key factors there.

Number one, nutrients.

I mean, I think most of us who have any kind of health problem, we think we're eating healthy, but the brain is very demanding.

[laughs] And if we are having migraines, we are using up energy at an incredible rate, and we can get nutrient deficiencies.

The brain has subtly different needs than other organs, and we're not always eating exactly what our brain needs or supplementing exactly what we need to reduce headaches.

So I think that is a pretty big piece.

Also, you know, we've learned a lot more about what is going on under the surface, what's really causing these headaches for people, and we know that one of those problems is inflammation.

I mean, I think anybody who's ever had a headache took an anti-inflammatory, like an NSAID.

So we know that there's a piece from inflammation, and what we've discovered in the last 10 to 15 years is that leaky gut is a big driver of that inflammation for people with headaches, as well as other inflammatory problems.

And with that, you can also get problems clearing toxins out of your body.

A- as I was saying, the brain is very energy demanding, [laughs] and as part of that, it makes the brain particularly susceptible to toxins.

And unfortunately, we just...

We live in a more toxic world than we ever have before.

And for some people, especially if your genetics are such that you don't clear toxins out of your body, then you're gonna have a harder time getting rid of all of those.

And why that's important for migraine is that toxins selectively hit your mitochondria, and those are the little parts of your brain cells, and really all the cells in your body, b- but they make energy.

And because the brain is so energy dependent and uses so much of your energy, we're really dependent on those mitochondria performing at their peak, and toxins just prevent them from doing that.

There are some super fascinating new theories about how some subsets of migraine are probably really a mitochondrial problem, so it's an interesting new area of research.

So that's just kind of a big picture overview of some of the things that are going on when you, you lift up the hood and look underneath.

If we're even talking about brain health and brain function, are there objective ways to really understand what that looks like? Obviously, if somebody has a migraine, they have that pain associated with it.