The Miracle Moment debuts!
In this premiere episode of the “Miracle Moment,” I talk about all the things you can expect from the new show, and then turn attention to the question “is migraine freedom without pills possible?”
Episode 1 Transcript
[00:00:38] Hey there folks. Welcome to the premiere episode of the Migraine Miracle Moment or a Miracle Moment for short. Thanks so much for joining me here today. [00:00:48] This is something I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time and I’m so excited that I can finally make it happen. The mission of this show, which is the mission of everything in the migraine miracle universe, is to help you find your path to migraine freedom. [00:01:08] I’ve got a lot of things I want to share with you folks, and I think this show is going to be a really good format for doing so. [00:01:16] With this initial series of episodes, I’ll be covering the foundations of the Migraine Miracle plan to kind of help to set the stage for future conversations and kind of give us a common language to talk about these things. [00:01:32] So in this first episode I’m going to first tell you about a little bit about what to expect with the Migraine Miracle Moment and then we’ll turn our attention to the primary topic of the day which is “is migraine freedom without pills possible?” [00:01:48] I’ll also share with you what in my opinion is the single most important factor when it comes to reaching migraine freedom. And speaking of sharing if you know of anyone who might benefit from this show please don’t hesitate to share it with them. Also, if you find yourself enjoying this episode don’t hesitate to hit the like button. That will also help more people to discover it. So I’ll be bringing you a weekly episode like this one at a regularly scheduled time which we’ve set as Wednesdays at 2:30 p.m. Eastern. [00:02:27] And I imagine these will probably be around 30 minutes to an hour or so. These will be the full length episodes and there will be a video replay of each of these episodes at my mymigrainemiracle.com/moment. [00:02:42] It’ll also be available in audio form as a podcast, and some of you may be listening to it on audio right now. So that will be available on the site as well as anywhere you download or stream podcasts like iTunes. [00:02:58] So in addition to these primary full length episodes, I’ll also be doing some shorter segments or “in-betweenisodes” if you will. So I’ll use those shorter episodes to answer any questions that arise from the primary episodes, as well as to cover any kind of related topics to the primary episode. [00:03:19] So feel free to leave questions in the comments section. Or if you see a question that someone else has posted and you’d like to see it answered, then hit the like button as a way of uploading it and I’ll know that that is a popular question to answer in a subsequent episode. [00:03:38] So first off for those who are watching but have no idea who I am, my name is Josh Turknett. I’m a neurologist and a migraine specialist and I’ve been in practice for over a decade. [00:03:51] I’ve done clinical research in migraine and I’ve worked with over 10000 migraine sufferers one on one. So I’ve got fancy degrees and credentials and all that jazz but I don’t put a whole lot of stock in that sort of thing, and I don’t expect you to either. [00:04:09] In fact, I’ll bet that many of you have been to doctors with fancy credentials who weren’t able to help you much at all, especially if you have migraines. [00:04:19] And at the end of the day all that really matters is whether or not I can help you, because that’s what I’m here to do, to help you slay the migraine beast once and for all. And perhaps just as important as my academic credentials and my experience in working with migraine sufferers for many years is the fact that I’m also a longtime migraine sufferer myself. [00:04:43] I was born with migraines in my genes. Both my parents have migraines, and my mom had them particularly bad. Mine started around the age of 10 and steadily worse and over the years. So I know exactly what it’s like to have them. [00:05:01] I know what it’s like to be curled up in a ball on the floor for days on end vomiting every time I moved, and wishing for an end to the misery in any way shape or form. [00:05:11] And I know how desperate and helpless it can feel when you have a daily unrelenting headache and you don’t know if there’s any end in sight. [00:05:19] So I’ve been there, which I think is probably more important than anything else. And it’s because I’ve been there and because I now know that nobody should have to endure that sort of misery that I’m on a mission to try to reach as many people as possible with the information and help they need to get on the path to migraine freedom. [00:05:39] I also know that it’s impossible to understand what migraines are like unless you’ve been through them yourself. And that’ll actually be the subject of a future episode. In fact, I can’t even appreciate just how awful they are except when I’m in the midst of one. And that’s probably a good thing. [00:05:57] So like I said mine became progressively worse as I became an adult and they continued to worsen into my 30s. And then a few years ago I made a remarkable and essentially accidental discovery that changed all of that entirely, taking me from chronic migraines to migraine freedom. [00:06:17] That was something that I would have never before thought possible. So like most people I just assumed that my migraines were an inevitable fact of life and I just had to learn to deal with them. And so when I discovered this new approach, I began using it with patients and it was so effective that it wrote a book about it and began trying to spread the word in every way possible. [00:06:41] So the book is called The Migraine Miracle. And I now believe there is a path to migraine freedom for everyone. So my goal was to try to provide every tool and resource I can to help find it. [00:06:56] I also know that it’s not something that folks are going to get in the conventional health care system, for reasons that we’ll discuss in this and in future episodes. [00:07:07] So in this first episode we’re going to be asking the question of whether it’s possible to reach migraine freedom without pills. Certainly that’s something I would have been extremely skeptical of just a few years ago. [00:07:21] So recently I took a poll inside of our Migraine Miracle Facebook group and I posed this question: does the idea of taking medications long term bother you. And the choices were, number one, “Absolutely. I hate taking pills and worry about long term effects. I always prefer natural treatments whenever possible. [00:07:46] The second choice was “Yes it bothers me but I feel like I have no other choice right now. I definitely prefer to treat them without pills though.” [00:07:54] The third choice was “it bothers me a little but it’s worth it overall. I think the benefits outweigh the risks.” [00:08:01] And then the fourth choice was “taking pills doesn’t bother me as long as they work. I trust that they’re generally safe.” [00:08:08] And you’ll see that the first answer choice, which was absolutely I hate taking pills and would always prefer natural treatments, was the winner. So 98 folks gave that response and that was exactly half. [00:08:21] And then in close second was the second response where folks said they were bothered with the idea of having to take medications but felt like they had no other choice. And that’s certainly something I can relate to. [00:08:34] Then the last two choices which were it only bothers them a little or not really at all, only received a small number of votes. [00:08:47] So clearly there’s a concern about taking pills in general. And for many people that’s more than reason enough to go looking for alternatives. Which brings up the question of whether there ARE viable alternatives to medications and whether you can actually achieve control over your migraines from migraine freedoms without pills. [00:09:07] So I’m going to first go over what I consider to be the standard approach to migraine treatment. And this is essentially the approach that’s considered to be the standard of care. It’s what the American Academy of Neurology recommends. [00:09:23] And so you’ll essentially get some variation of it if you go to see a neurologist for your migraines, as neurologists are generally the specialty with the greatest expertise in migraines. And this is the approach that I use for myself and for my patients for many years. [00:09:41] I won’t go into too many details of the specifics since that’s beyond the scope of this discussion. But I’m just going to give some of the basic principles of the approach. So the cornerstone of this of this of the standard approach are medications. [00:09:55] Some of you may have attended the the World Migraine Summit recently that I took part in as well and you may have noticed that most of the focus there was on medications, either on drugs that are currently available or ones that are in development. [00:10:12] And that should come as no surprise since medications are the primary treatment that doctors have and that doctors use these days. And the goal of most evaluations in any medical clinic is to figure out what prescription to write for. [00:10:28] In many ways, it’s really the only possible choice. So the statistics say that the average face to face time that doctors have with patients is about seven and a half minutes. [00:10:40] And the majority of all encounters are focused primarily on drug therapy, or what medication to prescribe or adjust. And I don’t think there is any sign that this will change anytime soon because there aren’t any any forces in place that would do so. [00:10:57] So when it comes to migraines there are two categories of prescriptions. There are the abortive medications. Those are pills that are taken to try to relieve an existing migraine. And so those are taken as needed. [00:11:12] Then there are the preventative medications. These are pills that are taken every day in hopes of reducing the likelihood of a migraine attack or reducing the frequency of migraines. And then sometimes on top of that there will be other supplemental measures that may be also be part of the treatment plan. [00:11:32] In some cases that may include an effort to identify and avoid food triggers, which can be accomplished in a number of ways. And the concept of food triggers is pretty well established and accepted, though there are some that are more controversial than others. [00:11:49] There are some food triggers that are well-established like alcohol and then some that are a bit more controversial like bananas or something like that. Then there are other preventative treatments like Botox injections or the Cephaly device and various types of nerve blocks that can also be used again as a means of trying to prevent migraine attacks. [00:12:13] So first let’s talk about the “pros,” or the advantages, of the standard approach. So one advantage is that it can help people feel better in the short term. [00:12:27] There’s no question that triptans – which are the class of drugs that are most commonly prescribed as an abortive treatment – that those worked best for ending a migraine attack and the release of sumatriptan which was the first triptan in 1991 was definitely a landmark event for migraine. [00:12:49] I can still remember, I was a teenager at the time, and I can remember how elated my mom was after she first took it. So she had a sample and she pulled over to the side of the road and injected it into her thigh. And within minutes had relief from her migraine. [00:13:04] And that was something she’d never experienced before. So it was a momentous occasion for her. [00:13:12] Another advantage of the standard approach is that it’s easy. It’s easy from the standpoint of both the doctor and the patient. The doctor can just write a prescription, which takes a few seconds, and the patient can just swallow a pill which also takes a few seconds. [00:13:30] Now let’s talk about the disadvantages, or the drawbacks, of the standard approach. So the first disadvantage is that it’s not addressing the root cause of migraines, or why they’re occurring in the first place. [00:13:44] And we’ll talk about this a good bit more in future episodes in part because there’s so much misinformation out there about what migraines are. But broadly speaking migraines are a multi-factorial problem. [00:13:58] Like most chronic conditions, they aren’t the result of any one thing, but rather are the result of a complicated relationship between your genes and your environment. And that’s what makes them so challenging. [00:14:11] It’s also why the chances that the cure for them will ever come in the form of a pill, or any one single treatment, is astronomically low. [00:14:21] So missing altogether from the standard approach is that it doesn’t ask why someone has them or is experiencing migraines to begin with, nor does it make any attempt to try to treat them at their root cause. [00:14:35] And part of that is simply a product of how the system is set up, as I mentioned earlier. So anything that can’t be fixed with a pill won’t be because that’s essentially the primary tool we have. [00:14:48] But to limit eliminate any chronic multifactorial illness including migraines you have to address root causes. The second disadvantage is that it’s just not all that effective. [00:15:01] The preventative treatments are not very powerful at all, with only very modest improvements if any in the typical patient. And in order for them to work they must be taken every day. [00:15:13] So many folks will experience side effects from taking a daily medication in the short term. And many folks, as the as the survey poll we did shows, are rightly worried about the long term effects, which are largely unknown. But in spite of those risks, and in spite of the poor effectiveness of preventative medicines, they are still considered standard, and the American Academy neurology recommends they be considered for anyone who’s having more than a few headache days per month. [00:15:44] Now one problem is that those guidelines are written by doctors who receive part of their income from the drug companies, who are the very people who make the drugs they’re recommending. So that obviously raises a potential issue there. [00:15:59] But I think the main reason that they’re recommended is that this is considered to be the best option there is. [00:16:04] So even though it’s not that great and they don’t work all that well, a modest reduction is still considered to be better than nothing or as good as it gets, if medications are the only tool you’re considering. [00:16:25] But the biggest drawback, in my opinion, is that the drugs we’re using look like they are making people worse over the long term. So over the years in my practice I noticed a problem, which was that many people seemed to be getting worse over time. [00:16:41] Even though they may do well in the beginning with the initial treatments, particularly the triptans, or the abortive medications, over time they were getting more headaches. The medications were starting to lose their effectiveness and the migraines were dominating their lives more and more. [00:16:59] And that was the exact same thing that happened to me over the years. So despite myself having access to all the latest treatments and despite having a high level of expertise in the area from both an academic and a practical standpoint, with comprehensive knowledge of the subject and the science and experience with thousands of patients to draw on, in spite of that mine continued to worsen. [00:17:24] And the statistics also indicate that the prevalence of migraine is growing. Now, gven that over the past few decades we’ve seen many more drugs approved for migraines and many more treatments come available, you’d think and you’d expect things to be getting better. I just mentioned that in 1991 it was a landmark event with the release of the first trip tan. [00:17:45] So it seemed like we were on the cusp of making migraines a non-issue. Yet, since that time they’ve only become more prevalent. [00:17:55] So what does this tell us that, in spite of all that, they seem to not be getting any better and, if anything, getting worse. [00:18:02] Could it mean that the standard approach that we’re using and that the drugs we’re using in addition to not addressing the root cause are actually making the very condition we’re trying to help worse over time? That the things we’re doing to try to help in the short term are inadvertently making matters worse in the long term? [00:18:21] And ultimately I reached that conclusion myself, and it was certainly something that I didn’t want to think and something that I resisted for a while. [00:18:30] Like most every other doctor my primary goal was to help people feel better. And to send them away better off for having seen me. [00:18:38] So to think that not only what I was doing was not the best approach, but was making the very thing I was trying to help worse, was a bitter pill – no pun intended – and a very difficult thing to acknowledge. [00:18:57] So now I’m going to talk about the pros and cons of the approach I now use for myself, and for everyone I work with, which we often refer to as the Migraine Miracle Plan, which is outlined in the book, but which I also refer to as the Root Cause Approach. [00:19:14] As I mentioned earlier my migraines began around the age of 10 and then steadily worse and over the years. [00:19:21] And as a neurologist and migraine specialist I was doing everything I could for them. So I thought that was as good as it could get. [00:19:30] And then I got really into nutrition, and after doing so realized that much of how I’d thought about healthy eating was wrong. So I felt compelled to change the way I was eating and living. [00:19:45] The approach that I adopted is outlined in our Getting Started guide, and there is a there’s a link in the description to beastslayers.com where you can go and download that guide. [00:20:02] So I adopted that plan without any hope or expectation that it would help my migraines. But in a matter of weeks they vanished. So here’s a graph kind of of how things looked for me.
