Here is a sentence that the pharmaceutical industry will hate to hear.

Never treat the symptom; find the root cause!

I waited for over a month to ensure, my findings are working before writing this blog:

I have been suffering from frequent migraines over the last six months – almost one every two weeks and the only way to get rid of it was to sleep it off.

So one fine day, I had enough, and I decided to address this problem. I have permanently solved several other issues I had, like asthma, so I was confident that I could solve this.

I do not claim to have solved anything for everyone – but definitely, for me, I have figured out what triggers it, and now it is gone.

Here is how I figured things out and finally solved it for me.

1. Structure of facial nerve

When I get a migraine, it starts around the back of my head, then spreads to my chin and parts of my face, and then hearing any sound or light becomes a terrible experience.

The technical term the medical guys use for this is cortical spreading depression. It means that the nerves at the top part of your brain are being depressed, triggering them to fire away signals.

So how do we explain the pain over the face?

What if there is a never that covers the different parts of the brain but converges at a single point somewhere where pressure on that point can create a traveling pain, as I described above?

The answer is: we happen to have one – called the trigeminal nerve.

Ok, so what is one way to confuse people and sell more drugs? – tell them we do not know what triggers migraines, and there is this host of things like environment ( which is not under your control). I did take medicines to calm my migraine – which had severe warnings and side effects mentioned in the leaflet.

The assumption:

The brain floats in a fluid called the cerebral spinal fluid ( CSF), and what if an increase in water retention increases the fluid pressure. Is that fluid exerting pressure on the brain surface and eventually on the trigeminal nerve? This should clearly explain the aura and the physical pain.

Intracranial hypertension means that the pressure of the fluid that surrounds the brain (cerebrospinal fluid or CSF) is too high. Elevated CSF pressure can cause two problems, severe headache and visual loss.

I decided to dive a little deeper into what can trigger water retention in the human body.

2.Blood pressure

For the blood pressure to go up, An event triggers the release of ADH ( also called arginine vasopressin)

Arginine vasopressin is a peptide hormone formed in the hypothalamus, then transported via axons to the posterior pituitary, which releases it into the blood. This increases blood volume, cardiac output, and arterial pressure.

The commonly known target tissues for vasopressin are the kidney collecting duct (with V2R) and the vascular smooth muscle cells (with V1aR).

Do not get worried about these terms. You can skip the above two paragraphs and still get it. 🙂

It means that the body tries to retain more water, and at the same time, increase pressure in the blood vessels.

So what triggers these

    Food that dehydrates
    Lack of salt
    Dehydration from exercise.
    Alcohol driven dehydration
    Other things like stress or other things that trigger the hypothalamus might also trigger it as a side effect.

So here is the critical point:

Once ADH is triggered, and the vessels in the kidney are constricted, if you drink more water, it will increase blood pressure.

So the condition in the body signals to your brain that you are getting dehydrated. It could be a food that absorbs water or lack of salt or just simple dehydration from exercise. So the body is in the process of increasing the blood pressure, and if you drink water immediately and in large quantities – it doubles the problem.

So how I finally put 1 and 2 together to solve it.

The solution: ( isolation of trigger method)

I started by not eating anything from the time of waking up to dinner time. And every day, I took one thing from the list of things I eat regularly to see how my body reacts. It included vitamins, supplements, food, etc. Just take one item per day and see what happens.

After about a week, voila, the terrible migraine is back!!

What had I taken?

Psyllium husk.

So psyllium husk starts pulling water, body senses, lack of water.

ADH is released, blood pressure goes up. I take more water thinking it will help, blood pressure keep going up further as there is now more fluid in the system.

It increases the CSF pressure, puts pressure on the nerves in the head and face – boom – you have a migraine!

Simple fluid mechanics.

I am sure this explanation does not help sell more drugs, and there will be a confusing truckload of articles out there disproving any link to elevated blood pressure and increase in CSF pressure bla bla ..

Just remember one thing – if you hear contradicting messages – research shows x is good, and another research shows x is bad – someone is trying to confuse you and sell more of x.

Another method is to create trigger confusion and throwing so many possible triggers out there, so you feel helpless and reach for the pill.

I do hope this article inspires you to find your own triggers for release of ADH ( I am almost certain it is something you take in or even a feeling you hold on to) and solve it using the trigger isolation method.