It can seem impossible to flourish while experiencing migraines or other chronic conditions or pain. However there are some ways to manage these things, so that they don’t have total control over us.

I’ve had migraines since I was 16 years old. At times, the episodes were long and hard, but they didn’t happen very often. Other times of my life, I’ve experienced several migraines a week.

In this post, I want to share some things that have helped me personally. I don’t presume to be a doctor or authority of any kind. My own experience is with migraines, but maybe some of what I share will be helpful to you, even if you deal with another type of issue.

In my own experience, I’ve found doctors to be of limited value. I’m not saying I don’t use prescribed medicines (I do) or that I wouldn’t go to a doctor (I have).

What I’m saying is, it’s up to us to take control of our health.

Doctors are more apt to run tests and prescribe pharmaceuticals.

Doctors are less likely to address areas where we can take control for ourselves.

By changing the way we eat and exercise and by exploring various natural remedies, we may find things that truly help us.

If we only take the advice of a doctor and never explore for ourselves, we may miss out on the things that will really help us solve or manage our health problems.

Ultimately, we make the decisions for our own health, so we need to put in the work of deciding what’s best for us.

A few resources that I’ve found helpful:

Earthclinic.com

I love this site. You can search any affliction and find natural remedies for it. But the best part of the site is there are so many reviews from real people on how the various remedies worked for them.

Curable 

I used this app for quite a while and listened to a lot of the info they put out. I began to understand that my brain had created pathways of pain and triggers for pain. The app helps to retrain the brain, so that it can calm down and stop experiencing pain.

When I first found Curable, they focused on migraines. Now it looks like they have helps for many types of chronic pain.

Research “functional medicine + your issue”

Using this search term is what led me to discover salt as a solution to my migraines. It also led me to doctors discussing magnesium and other helps for migraines.

The goal is to find helpful info that is not just the name of a prescribed medicine, but gets more at the root of the issue and how you can manage or solve the problem.

My migraine story

I’ve had migraines since I was 16 years old.

The last few years, I had an average of 2-3 per week or 8-12 per month.

I’ve been on all kinds of medications, including daily blood pressure meds to prevent migraines. It worked for a while, but then stopped working. However, I continued taking the meds thinking the migraines would be even worse if I stopped.

A few years ago, I decided to wean off the meds, under the care of a doctor. My migraines did not worsen after getting off the meds. I wish I’d stopped taking the medication sooner, since it wasn’t helping anyway.

In March, I decided to do a deep dive on finding help for myself. This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to fix my migraines, and it my not be the last time (although, I’m hopeful!).

My experience adding salt to my diet and why I’m doing it

When I researched “functional medicine migraines”, I found a lot of information about the benefits of salt.

According to what I found, people with migraines tend to have high levels of potassium and this needs to be balanced with sodium.  I know from some past blood tests that I have had high potassium levels.

Here are two of the resources I found:

Stanton Migraine Protocol – This protocol also includes eliminating all grains, along with some other stringent requirements. I read through the parts about increasing salt and decided to start there.

This short video does a great job of explaining how increasing salt can help with migraines. He recommends increasing the sodium levels to 4600 mg/day.  2300mg is the recommended daily amount.

I wasn’t even getting close to that amount on most days.  1 teaspoon of salt has about 2300 mg of sodium. That means I need to consume about 2 teaspoons of salt per day.

I’ve been adding 1/8 tsp. Himalayan pink salt to 8 oz water. I aim to drink about 8 glasses of salted water each day. It’s the first thing I have in the mornings and last thing right before bed.

I also try to salt my food, something I never used to do. I even add 1/8 tsp salt to my morning oats.

I sometimes add 1/8 tsp salt to my coffee, which is surprisingly good.

I add salt to apples and peanut butter – delicious!

I’ve been doing this salt protocol for about two months now and I’ve reduced my migraines to 1-2 per month.

I’m still not consuming 4600 mg of sodium on most days. I’m going to aim to increase my salt levels even more to see if I can eliminate the migraines altogether.

Other things that I’ve found helpful over the years

These are in no particular order.

• Quitting sugar
• Gua sha routine – I wrote about this in this post https://flourish52.com/2023/04/10-tiny-flourishes-from-march/
• Hand pressure thing – Helps when you do get a headache/migraine https://amzn.to/3MHi14L
• Fake Treximet – Treximet was the medicine that worked best to get rid of a migraine. I usually only needed 1/2 tablet. But my insurance stopped paying for Treximet. It turns out that this drug is a combo of Imitrex/sumatriptan and Aleve. Now I take my fake version – 1/2 sumatriptan tablet + 1 Aleve. NOTE: Remember that I’m not a doctor and this isn’t medical advice. Just sharing what works for me.
• Feverfew – Taking this daily used to work to prevent my migraines, but after a while it stopped working.

I’ve also tried these, but they’ve not made much difference for me. Others do find them helpful though.

• Magnesium
• Magnesium oil
• CoQ10

What works for you?

Do you have chronic pain or migraines? Have you found something that helps you manage or decrease them? Share in the comments.