Chronic headaches of many types can be treated effectively with both homeopathy and osteopathy. These include tension headache, migraines, cluster headaches, daily persistent headaches as well as headaches which occur before and during the menstrual period, during sleep, after coughing and from exertion. Head pain and facial pain lasting from minutes to days, one sided and bilateral, will all yield to the combination of homeopathy and osteopathy. Conventional treatment is not geared toward cure but rather continued treatment with various drugs from NSAIDs such as Indomethacin, sumatriptan type drugs such as Imitrex, beta blockers such as Propranolol, seizure medication such as Topamax, as well as Lithium, caffeine, acetaminophen and aspirin. However, my goal is always to aim for cure, not life long treatment with drugs of any kind. Over the past 27 years I have cured hundreds of patients afflicted with this condition and failed to help only two patients.
My experience with headaches is also personal. From the age of 10 to about age 36, I suffered with chronic headaches. Of course, as a child my family didn’t know about homeopathy or osteopathy and all my GP could offer me was a muscle relaxing drug which served only to make me sleepy in class. Headaches were at least once a week, sometimes for three days in a row. They were a combined migraine and muscle tension headache. Getting treated while an osteopathic student greatly reduced the frequency but they could crop up unexpectedly. A couple of years before medical school, I started seeing a homeopath but even after several years of prescribing, my headaches persisted through medical school, my internship and into the first 2 years of practice. One day while reading about a particular remedy, I realized that it really fit me to a tee. Not just the chronic headache symptoms but other physical, mental and emotional symptoms as well. One dose of that remedy was all it took to break the cycle that had lasted over twenty five years. Subsequent doses of that remedy completely cured the headaches and as an added benefit it cured my seasonal allergies that I had developed while in medical school. When the headaches returned after Lyme disease, one dose of that remedy in very high potency put an immediate stop to them again. I learned an important lesson from my experience that I continued to apply to this day and it is this: don’t try to find the remedy for any individual headache, find the remedy that treats the tendency to have chronic headaches. I tell headache patients to continue to use whatever drug their conventional doctor has prescribed to get temporary relief and that when the correct homeopathic remedy is found, the headache pattern will begin to change, symptoms will become less severe and less frequent. This will usually happen after several months of treatment.
Osteopathy is an important component of my treatment as all headache patients receive osteopathic treatment as well. A trauma history is always taken and after the first visit it will become clear which modality will predominate. Treatment of the cranium, the sacrum, the cervical and thoracic spinal areas are important as is an assessment of the bones of the face and mouth. About 20 years ago, a psychiatrist sent me a patient who had chronic headaches since a minor car accident several years before. She was unable to obtain any relief from the many doctors she had seen, including the psychiatrist. I took her case and gave her a prolonged osteopathic treatment, focusing not only on her head but all of the body parts where the effects of the car accident had lingered for years. I also gave her a high potency dose of Hypericum, a remedy useful for spinal and head trauma. The following day she called to tell me that she had the worst headache she had ever had. I told her not to worry, that treatment reactions to osteopathic manipulation and homeopathic remedies can happen. I advised her that she could take some Tylenol and to call me in 48 hours. She never called so I assumed that I didn’t help her or that she got spooked by her treatment reaction. Five years went by before I spoke to the psychiatrist about another one of his patients. I asked him, whatever happened to the young woman with the chronic headaches? He said that she was completely cured of the headaches.