How to Stop Headaches Using Science Based Approaches

I'm not going to tell you that seed oils are bad. However, it does seem to be the case that many people are consuming far too many seed oils and, in doing so, are consuming far too many calories and perhaps are consuming too much of the omega-6 fatty acids relative to the omega-3 fatty acids.

In this study, they had people take a dose of 0.4g of creatine monohydrate per kg of body weight. So, for somebody that weighs 100kg or 220 pounds, that will be 40g of creatine per day ... They found a very significant decrease in the frequency of headache in people that were supplementing with creatine as opposed to the controls.

I am not of the belief that all seed oils are bad, that they're all inflammatory, that they are killing us or making us sick, that they are the major cause of metabolic dysfunction, etc.

It does seem that getting above 1g per day of EPA omega-3 fatty acids... is going to be the critical threshold for reductions in the frequency and intensity of headaches—that includes both tension headaches and migraine headaches.

People with headache, in particular people with TBI, ought to consider supplementing with creatine in order to deal with their headaches.

If omega-6s were just reduced on their own, there wasn't as great an effect in terms of reducing pain and inflammation as there was when omega-3 fatty acids were deliberately increased and omega-6 fatty acids were reduced.

Increasing omega-3 fatty acids in the diet, so either consumed through food sources or by supplementation, was associated with a lower prevalence of severe headache or migraine.

In exploring a huge range of omega-3 supplementation, ranging from 200mg all the way up to 2,000mg per day, it really was at the 1g or higher dosage per day where the significant impact on reducing headache frequency and intensity was found.

Curcumin, when taken at dosages of about 80mg... in conjunction with, although not necessarily at the same time, but taken daily alongside omega-3 fatty acids at 2.5g per day, led to significant improvements in migraine and other forms of headache.

Females suffer from migraine headaches at a rate at least threefold higher than do males.

If you are somebody that's experiencing the kind of pain that is consistent with cluster headache, taking a standard anti-inflammatory... is unlikely to relieve cluster headache either acutely, meaning right away, or in preventing cluster headaches. You have to deal with this as a neural issue.

On the first to about the fourth or fifth day of the menstrual cycle... both estrogen and progesterone are very, very low. And it is at that time, at the very beginning of the menstrual cycle, so about the first week of the menstrual cycle, that many women are very prone to hormonal headaches.

Cluster headaches are headaches that arise not from the surface... But rather, it feels as if the headache is coming from deep within the head and, in particular, from behind the orbit of one or the other eyes—and sometimes both eyes.

Pregnancy, for whatever reason, seems to be protective against migraine headaches. That is, women who suffer from recurring migraines before they get pregnant, when they get pregnant, and often after they give birth, they experience fewer migraine headaches.

What do we know? We know that in migraine, there's a hyper-dilation of the blood vessels, a hyper-dilation of the very little portals that exist in the brain and around the brain that are going to cause the pain—they're going to activate those sensory neurons, those nociceptors—that will then give us the experience of extreme headache and migraine. So, taking an aspirin or something like it for migraine, in some cases, is the worst possible choice.

Men experience cluster-type headaches that have a sudden onset during sleep at five times the frequency than do females.

Low estrogen and another hormone, low progesterone, combine to give rise to a headache because of the ways that low estrogen and low progesterone impact vasodilation and vasoconstriction and the inflammatory response.

Essential oils applied to the skin can reduce the symptoms of tension headache in a significant way and actually can lead to some offset of some of the cognitive defects seen with headaches.