Cracking the Migraine Code: Relief through Bio-Psycho-Social Integration
Join host Toréa Rodriguez on a self-discovery journey as she unravels the intricate puzzle of her own migraines. In this episode of Wildly Optimized Wellness, Toréa shares her decade-long quest to conquer chronic pain, exploring the synergy of nature's remedies, medical protocols and wellness foundational basics. From Lyme treatments to blood sugar regulation, Toréa divulges the linchpins of her migraine relief, offering invaluable insights for those navigating their own path to treat chronic pain. Discover the transformative power of nature's healing forces intertwined with the complexities of bio-psycho-social dynamics. If you have ever wondered how to tackle a complex health issue like chronic pain, have a listen!
In This Episode
00:00 - Cracking the Migraine Code: Relief through Bio-Psycho-Social Integration.
02:37 - Toréa's Personal Journey with Chronic Migraines
12:18 - Uncovering Underlying Factors
17:34 Introduction to the concept of pain as a bio-psycho-social phenomenon.
24:56 - Exploring Solutions: Electrolytes, Blood Sugar, and Lifestyle Changes
35:42 - Shifting Language, Perspectives and Identity
44:19 - Looking Ahead: Resources and Support
Resources Mentioned
Wilderness Reset Retreat 23-27 May 2024
LMNT Electrolytes https://torea.co/drinkLMNT
Nutrisense CGM https://torea.co/cgm
Fighting the Migraine Epidemic Book by Angela A Stanton PhD
Connect with Toréa
Website: https://www.torearodriguez.com/
Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/torearodriguez/
Transcript
Toréa Rodriguez 0:00
Welcome to the Wildly Optimized Wellness. I am your host Toréa Rodriguez, and I've had a lifelong fascination with the natural world, and its impact on our well being. For over a decade, my work as a functional practitioner has been exploring how our relationship to our environment, to our thoughts, beliefs and emotions can have a profound impact on our physical and mental wellness. And because of that neurology, and brain based rewiring is a core focus of my practice. I am passionate about helping people not only feel better, but actually achieve that vibrant, no holds barred version of themselves. They've been missing for a long time, and how we actually get there. Well, that is what this show is all about. Please keep in mind that this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. And if you liked what you hear today, I would love it. If you would leave a review, hit that follow button or share it with a friend. Because we never know how much we can impact others when we do. Let's start today's adventure, shall we?
Toréa Rodriguez 1:11
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. And today I wanted to share my quest to solve the puzzle of my own migraines, I think in this important topic, because pain loops or chronic pain can be one of the most complex health conditions to sort out. So for anybody who deals with chronic pain, this is definitely worth a listen, because I share my discoveries, if you will, trying to sort out my own puzzle of pain, because migraine suck. Right? I would say they're probably the second most painful headache pain condition other than cluster headaches. And so for some migraines can also change their sense of smell or their vision along with or without pain. So sometimes people are having migraines that aren't painful, but it's still the same kind of neurological issue. And so for me, it was pain that was centered around the sinuses, behind the eyes, and then also in the back at the occipital area, the spot where the spine meets the skull. And it's almost like the way I describe it is when I'm in the middle of it. It's like there's a sea urchin inside my brain and all the spines are like poking out through the skull and poking out through like my eye sockets. It was awful. I was photosensitive meaning bright light made the pain much much worse. I was hypersonic meaning extremely sensitive to smells, and my sinuses burned. Sorta like it was a weird sensation. Right but I wasn't having a sinus infections or anything like that. But you could tell there was inflammation there.
Toréa Rodriguez 2:56
Over the counter pain meds didn't make a dent high dose I tried high dose Boswellia which is also called Frankincense and Tumeric. That didn't make a dent. I tried all sorts of natural pain relievers that didn't make it. The only thing that ever really gave me any kind of relief during this was cold dark quiet. Like that was it you would find me with earplugs or noise cancelling headset? An eye mask, an icepack, right with the shades drawn, like that was it it. It was excruciating, and it wasn't just a few hours like a normal headache It can be this would go on for days, days at a time and so this started for me in honest, I would say I mean, I'd had a couple episodes before that were definitely hormone related but it started in earnest in my 30s and at first I thought they might be hormonal or cycle related. And when I started tracking them, the pattern didn't line up to the menstrual cycle. So that wasn't it right and I happened to mention this, the headaches to the dentist that I was seeing at the time. And he sent me to the California Cranial Institute, and under their guidance, I underwent jaw and cranial bone manipulation, and we tried to realign the bite to alleviate some of the pressure on the head. And while it made a mild improvement, I knew of nothing to really make them any better. So all I did was learn how to grit my teeth and bear it like literally. And so I go to work in horrible pain and I just tried to stay busy to distract myself from the pain only to spend my rest hours with an ice pack on my head, right? and tell myself that it wasn't that bad because at least it wasn't that often. Right and didn't quite know how I was going to solve this. I just knew that I didn't want to go down the path of serious pain meds like that wasn't going to work for me. So fast forward in nearly a decade, the migraine episodes still came and went, right. They were still coming. I'd taken a leave of absence at this point because it was at this point that we discovered my difficult to treat thyroid and autoimmune conditions, Hashimotos and Raynaud's, and I've talked about both of those in previous episodes. And instead of the thyroid, a radiation and surgical removal that was offered by my endocrinologist, I chose to take a break from flying for a living, and for those of you who don't know, that was my previous clear and career, I was flying as a professional pilot back then and instead of going down the surgery route, I decided that I was going to take a leave of absence and pursue this holistic way of healing for the thyroid.
Toréa Rodriguez 5:45
So I started focusing on diet, doing the labs, following the protocols, taking all the supplements, staying active, eliminating inflammatory foods, which was at that time, a lot of foods, getting good sleep, all the things I was doing all the things, right. Here's the thing that I kind of laugh right now, because it in hindsight, it's funny during the experience, it's not funny, right? But the nervous system can be an absolute Joker. Under stress, it'll hold things together as best as it can, right? It keeps the machine going barely. Once there's a break, however, the crashes can happen, right? This used to happen to me all the time at university, my body would hold it together through finals, and then I would spend all the holiday breaks being sick. Probably one of the sickest times ever I got strep once during a holiday break. And it was awful. But that's the thing like the nervous system will under stress, keep us going barely. And this time, the joke was on me because my addiction of busy was in full force. Right? So now I'm taking this leave of absence and though I wasn't working, I certainly was busy dosing out my supplements and cooking on my own meals and if I had any extra time, then why not just put a ton of miles on the bike. Right. And in fact, the endurance cycling, which I was doing at kind of now looking back, that was a little much, I was pretty much putting in anywhere between 100 and 150 miles a week. So it was pretty excessive, right? And, but because of it, I generate the endorphins, and then I'd feel alive again, right, I should feel good. But it would take 30 to 45 miles at a minimum to feel normal. So clearly, this was a problem. And it was at this point that my practitioner that I was working with at the time, delivered my Diurnal Cortisol results. That is we sampled cortisol through saliva throughout the day to see where my cortisol was. And it should have followed a typical circadian rhythm pattern, which is in the morning, your cortisol is higher, that's the get up and go right, and in the evening, it should drop off at night. Mine was flatlined, like completely flatline. So much so that my practitioner at the time told me that I was one step away from Addison's disease, and that I needed to hang up the bike for a while.
Toréa Rodriguez 8:20
Well, that was a big transition. So without the miles to generate the endorphins, you can imagine what might have happened, I crashed right? And now the migraines got so much worse. So instead of being this occasional 3 day stretch, they grew to be four and five days long. And then it started happening three weeks out of the month, I was miserable. It was awful. It was probably one of the worst times from this. This was my true health crisis was dealing with these my migraines, right? And over the course of the protocols and looking under all the different rocks to see if we can figure out what are the root causes of what's going on. Eventually, all of the symptoms from the Hashimotos went into remission. That was great. But the migraine episodes they lessened, but I could count on them coming back and I could count on them mean a three day stretch, like clockwork, and they were happening every six to seven weeks. So fast forward to my mid 40s. At this point. I have trained to become the functional medicine practitioner that I am today. And I was always looking for clues as I was learning about new labs or new things or new biochemistry pathways. Like I was always looking for these clues to help with my migrainesa and because of the cyclical nature of their occurrence, I started to convince myself that they were related to a life cycle, a pathogenic parasite, a bacteria and amoeba whatever, right but a life cycle. So I was like Well, this could be plausible, right? I traveled to tropical countries in my lifetime, it was possible that there was some kind of pathogen that was triggering all of this inflammation. I was convincing myself, I had parasites in my sinuses, like it was kind of crazy. Anyway, all that to be said, infectious disease specialist is somebody that I sought out, and I asked him, Look, I want you to run like all the labs, like all the crazy pathogens that you're aware of just run all the labs, and he insisted that we run a Lyme panel. At the Time Life is kind of like, okay, but headaches aren't the classic symptoms of Lyme. But he had seen a couple of clients of his who had Lyme and headaches. And you know, so we ran it, and all of the labs came back except for Lyme. Right. So now I was like, Oh, this is it, this is going to be the thing. So I went down the path of doing Lyme treatments. And you guys, those are no joke. There's ozone therapy, there's herbs, there's antibiotics, if you want to go that route, there were all sorts of really intense protocols to work on the line. So I started working with a practitioner, we had put together a herb based protocol for the lime coupled with ozone therapy, and I started doing these Lyme treatments. And it wasn't easy, and it felt awful. Like it just it doesn't feel good when you're going after this stuff, and even though I had prepared and done all the drainage pathway work and all of that stuff, it still wasn't easy, and then 2020 happened, right? And we knew that I was immunocompromised from the Lyme treatment. That's basically what's happening because you're trying to get the immune system to go after these pathogens, and it's focused on that anything else that comes in, there's not enough resources, you tend to be immunocompromised, you can get something else, right. So when each one is happening, and guess who got COVID super early, like before we even had vaccines before we even had testing, I was down for the count, right?
Toréa Rodriguez 12:28
We stopped all the Lyme treatment because of the immunocompromisation, and we change tactic, we decided that we would focus mostly on immune system resiliency. So we started boosting the immune system and supporting the immune system so that it could be more resilient, and then we can figure out what the heck to do during the pandemic, right. Two things, though, happened during that period of time simultaneously, during the pandemic, and they ended up being linchpins are really key findings for myself. So one thing that I started doing was an online functional movement class, and from David Thunder, I learned about electrolytes because we were talking about headaches. And he said, Okay, well here, when you get a headache, the next time you feel like this migraine coming on, I want you to drink a quarter teaspoon of sea salt in a very small amount of water half cup whatever you can do to tolerate it salty, A F right. So just check and see if that pain gets cut from a 10 or 11. Down at all, and holy moly, it cut the pain down from a 10 to a 5. And I was like what? Salt, like what is happening with the salt, right? And then he introduced me to this book, this book, it's called the nd in the migraine pandemic. I got this book, look how thick this book is and for those that don't see the video, this book is probably it's a softcover it's probably an inch and a half to two inches thick. But it's by Angela Stanton PhD. And it's the subtitle is complete guide to the complete guide how to treat and prevent migraines without medications. So I read the entire thing cover to cover. And the only two things in that book that I wasn't doing already were electrolytes and really looking at my blood sugar. And so I started supplementing with electrolytes and it started to help a little bit but I also recognize that I needed to play around with the electrolytes and figure out what is the proper dosage for me.
Toréa Rodriguez 14:46
And so after that, I always would get these migraines and I started to know this. I started to get to know the the like onset time I started to pay attention to the on Set time, the onset time was happening at three in the morning. So I would wake up in excruciating pain at three in the morning, and that would be the start of the three day cycle and so after I mentioned this, to the doctor that I was working on for the Lyme and the immune system stuff, he suggested to me that the migraines might be blood sugar related, and even though like I had done the finger prick testing and all that stuff, and even though my numbers were good throughout the day, we didn't know what was happening at nighttime, because I'm not waking up and poking my finger, right. So that's when I started using a CGM. And when I started getting the data from the CGM and the CGM, for those that don't know what that is. So it's a Continuous Glucose Monitor, that is something that you stick, I should do this arm, you stick it on the back of your arm, and it measures the glucose levels in the interstitial fluid of your arm, and then you get a readout on your phone and you can graph it. You can look at the trends of your meals, your movement, all of these different things. Right. And so I started using a CGM. And what I noticed is, there were a lot of signs of insulin resistance, which is interesting, because just checking my blood sugar before and two hours after a meal wasn't enough information to show me the insulin resistance sides. So I started changing some things in my lifestyle, I started moving after meals, I started to aim for dinner to be complete before sundown, I started eating more protein, heavy breakfast, and I started strength training and building muscle. And a lot of those things really started to get my blood sugar more stable. and there's not a day that goes by now that I'm not supplementing with more electrolytes the most. So if you go back and listen to episode 30, with Rob Wolfe talking about electrolytes, he talked about athletes losing up to 10 grams of sodium in a single day. And when I heard that, that kind of clicked a little light bulb in my head, right, I had a little epiphany moment, maybe I need to start experimenting with what's my upper level of electrolyte intake, right. So it's not uncommon now for me to use three to four packets of element, this stuff each day. And more on days, when I'm sweating, or days that I'm working out a lot or doing a lot of athletic activity.
Toréa Rodriguez 17:34
One packet of element has one gram of sodium in it. So on a daily basis, I'm taking three to four grams of sodium, which is much more than the average human. But what I started to put two and two together is that that combined with the blood sugar regulation has really been pretty much an amazing combination for me from a migraine. Now, it's been nearly two years and I've only had one, one, 3 day migraine episode, which was brought on by I'll say, a mismanaged fasting protocol. I started doing some fasting and it caused my blood sugar to dip lower than my body tolerates. And so I ended up Institute, basically triggering the pain loop, right. And so now when I'm doing any kind of fasting, I'm also doing that with a CGM in place so that I can monitor, monitor myself, and know when to end the fast if I need to end the fast. So I wanted to introduce this concept around pain. So that's kind of my story and the things that I learned. But I want to introduce this concept. Pain is a bio psycho social phenomenon. And this is something that I learned from Dr. Rachel softness, meaning that pain loops are simultaneously biological in nature, but also psychological, and social or what I like to say, environmental meaning there's something in the environment, whether that is a person a place a thing that can also act as a trigger. This is why pain and chronic pain can be so complex, because there's a lot of things that go into it. So to steal her analogy, if you think about pain as a recipe, in order to bake the perfect migraine cake, right, the ingredients need to be mixed together, but the process also needs to be followed. You cannot mix the batter, place it in an oven but not turn the heat on and get a migraine cake. You're just going to have better, right? But there's multiple elements that go into pain. This is why so much of the conventional approaches. Take a pain med, for example, don't always work because it's not always biological, right? There's so much more to it. So why do I bring this up? In this quest of mine to end my migraines, right took decades, it took decades. And I believe that it's partly due to all the physical triggers that I had to isolate over time to understand what is the contribution? You know, is it the Lyme pathogens? Is it electrolytes? Is it blood sugar? Is it too much sunlight? Like that can be a trigger for some people for migraines. Right. But there's also this so psycho.
Toréa Rodriguez 20:26
There's also the psychosocial aspect to it, right? bio psychosocial. And so I had to also do the deep inner work, what did it mean about me that I was still getting migraines, even though I'd become a health practitioner, you can bet that there was a bunch of shame that came up and wanting to hide that fact and not present that this was still something that I was being challenged with. I also had to look at what would I lose? What attention would I not receive? Or what love would I not receive if there were not to be a reason for my husband to take care of me when I was in a pain cycle, right? So there was that piece of it too, and I had to look at really hard, my addiction to busy, and how much I used to use that as an avoidance tactic to, I don't know, most of the emotions, right? So I really had to look at that. I had to ask questions of myself, like, who would I be if I were someone free of migraines? That was a biggie, because of course, on the surface, we don't want pain. Nobody wants pain. Nobody wants to live with chronic pain, right? But when pain is what we know, and what we keep saying to our friends and to ourselves, I wish I didn't have so many migraines, or I wish I had fewer headaches, or I just want less pain. What did the subconscious just hear blah, blah, blah, migraines, blah, blah, blah, headaches, blah, blah, blah, pain, and so the subconscious is wicked smart, it will deliver up any of the nouns we are using on a silver platter, it doesn't actually process less or without or, you know, no, I want no pain, it doesn't process those words ahead of time.
Toréa Rodriguez 22:13
Right. So I had to really focus on my language around it, I had to define who I am, when I have ample energy and feel vital and strong and alive. I had to describe my days and what I wanted, not what I didn't want. And that takes some practice if you're not used to it, because our language can be really, really powerful. And it's very common for people who are dealing with chronic situations, chronic health issues, chronic relationship triggers, like some chronic situations to start defining themselves as that being their identity. I am somebody who has migraines is an identity statement. And now I can say I am somebody who feels strong and alive on almost all days, except for once in the last two years, right. So it really took a lot of environmental stuff for me to approach this new level a new relationship to be able to change the pain loop that was happening in the brain, because the brain would get these recipe ingredients and then trigger a pain loop. Right. And for me, that pain loop, well, we turn it on, and then it doesn't turn off three days later. Right. So it took a lot of time for me to change some things, I had to spend more time in nature, less time on devices, I had to exit all those Facebook groups where I was surrounded by people who were deep in their suffering, the migrane groups, the lime groups that all of the different ones. And I'm not saying that I'm better than them at all. But there's an energy to someone who is suffering that's talking about it and taking on an identity. And when we surround ourselves by that, I can easily take on a reenact of that and myself.
Toréa Rodriguez 24:11
So I had to distance myself from all of that. And I know that pain is absolutely so complex, right? I also know that my recipe for pain isn't the same as your recipe for pain. We're all unique in that way. And that's what I love about that analogy by doctor's office so much is that it's a recipe. It's it just takes us that little bit of persistence to figure out what are all of the ingredients that go into our personal recipe. And I also know that in the functional medicine world we talk a lot about the root cause which is probably my biggest irritation point about the health industry right now is like we talked about the root cause and I think it's misleading, because it seems to infer that there's going to be one reason why we get sick and if we do just enough labs or swallow enough supplements, we're going to find the one right thing. Nothing could be further from the truth with any condition right? From all my clients that I've worked with, or myself, there are often times multiple pieces to the puzzle. So I like to think about them as linchpins rather than root cause. And the origin of the word linchpin comes from a literal definition of the pin that keeps the wheel attached to the axle. I'm doing really weird hand gestures on the video, but whatever you get the idea of but the term is evolved to be a figurative meaning, right, representing this vitally important person, or art or element that holds everything together to function as a whole. So I think of them as linchpins. And if I look at my migraine recipe, there were some key linchpins for me, so for me, electrolytes and blood sugar were key linchpins, it doesn't mean that, you know, spending more time in nature and less time on devices, for me was also impactful. It doesn't mean that the work that was done on the cranial bones and the jaw restructuring wasn't helpful. It was also lyme stuff. I'm sure that was part of it. But the linchpins were the electrolytes, the blood sugar and doing the deeper identity work, because we can't heal something if we stay in the same old ingredients that created the illness in the first place. Right. And this can go for physical body health issues, this can go for mental health issues, this can go for a lot of different things. Because it's all the bodies together. It's the mental, physical, emotional, energetic, all of them. They're also linked, we can't just focus on the One. So I tell the story, because persistence is where it's at.
Toréa Rodriguez 25:01
We don't want to give up looking for our linchpins, because we don't want to quit digging when we might be inches away from gold, right? Keep taking notes on your recipe, you will figure it out. This is how chefs figure out a repeatable recipe so they can deliver this awesome dish every single night and a recipe in a restaurant. They do that by taking notes on what are the key ingredients exactly how much how do we prepare it? What temperature do we use, and you can bet that for them to perfect that probably takes years all of their training all the time in the restaurant, like all that stuff takes years. They are just persistent. And they keep going they keep figuring it out, right? And if you've not tried looking at blood sugar or electrolytes, try it right get a CGM try some electrolytes. Experiment with doses that feel way too high. Like for me, three to four grams feels like an absurd amount. But that is what keeps those migraines at bay. It's what keeps me feeling the best. So I keep doing it.
Toréa Rodriguez 22:25
I will put information about resources. I'd love element electrolytes. I love the Nutrisense CGM. app, because I get a lot of really good information there. And if you're looking for a methodology to start doing some of the deeper belief and identity work, dig into the neurology around what's happening with these complex recipes, either with chronic pain or something else. I'm excited to share with you that my core program is making a comeback this year. So past participants keep asking me, when are you going to open the doors again, I have so many friends that are wanting to do this. And it's been one of the most impactful things in my life. I am most certainly opening the doors again for a fall cohort. It's gotten a fair bit of a remodel refresh. We've got newly recorded modules that are going in there, it's going to have a new name. It's still based on my bio neuro blueprint process. And you'll be hearing more about it soon when I open up enrollment. But for now, if you're curious, you can just take a look at the transformation Academy on my website. So if you are somebody who deals with pain, chronic pain, or if you are somebody who deals with complex chronic illness or if you are somebody who deals with anything on the chronic level. I really hope that you got some good takeaways from today's episode. I would love to hear from you if you did, and I will see you guys on the next episode.
Toréa Rodriguez 28:07
Hey, thanks for joining me for this episode of the Wildly Optimized Wellness podcast. If you're looking for new ways of thinking about your wellness, you can check out my website torerodriguez.com. Want to have a peek into what it's like to work with me? Check out the Wellness Curiosity Collective or any of my other programs or retreats. And if you found something helpful in today's episode, don't forget to leave a review hit that follow button or share it with a friend because they're gonna love that you thought of them. Until next time, See You Outside.
