Headache and Migraine Treatment and Prevention

We believe that migraine and tension headaches can come from an excess, depletion, or imbalance of multiple origins…

 Imagine a bucket that is being filled with water from multiple spigots.  If one or more of the spigots overfill the bucket, the result is head and neck pain.  The spigots represent potential sources of pain like pathology, optical, nutrition, skeletal-muscular, hormones, stress, and para-functional habits.  

 * Pathology: Need to see a Neurologist.

* Optical-Visual Disorder: Need to see eye doctor.

* Nutrition: Deficiency in vitamins, minerals, or trace minerals; food allergies or sensitivities.  

* Skeletal-muscular: Need to see chiropractor, acupuncturist, physical therapist, message therapist. 

* Hormones: Need to see MD or ND (Bio-identical hormones). 

* Stress: Counseling, exercise, yoga, meditation, hypnotherapy, message.  

* Para-functional Habits: Clenching and grinding teeth (often related to stress), TMJ/TMD. 

 Did you realize your teeth are only supposed to touch for nine minutes out of the day, including when you eat?  So even if you have perfect teeth with a perfect bite, you can still experience pain and discomfort if you are doing a para-functional habit. 

 Dentistry can address the para-functional habits of clenching and grinding teeth. 

Teeth grinding is evidenced by wear facets or grooves in the teeth. Clenching is highly under-diagnosed because the teeth do not look worn.  However, the tongue may appear scalloped.  When you clench your teeth together, you push your tongue against your teeth leaving indentations or waves on the side of your tongue. Other signs of clenching are tenderness/pain at the base of the skull, by the TMJ, and behind the temples.  Before you can grind your teeth, you must first clench them together.  

 Traditional mouth guards are full coverage-horseshoe shaped with an even bite on all the teeth, front and back. They are typically bulky, and they still give you the ability to produce a strong bite and clench your teeth together resulting in muscle and ligament strain experienced as pain.  The full coverage appliances will help with pain 1/3 of the time, do nothing 1/3 of the time, and make it worse 1/3 of the time. 

 We address para-functional habits with the help of a specialized mouth guard. The mouth guards we make are called NTI’s (Nocioceptive Trigeminal Inhibitor). Ideally, the appliance will eradicate your para-functional habit, and minimally, it will reduce the muscular forces to 20-30% of maximum (which may be enough to keep your bucket from overflowing). 

 82% of patients had a 77% reduction in migraine headaches using an NTI. 

For more information visit www.HeadachePrevention.com.

Dr. Dennis (grider) and Dr. Cindy (clencher) have both worn NTI’s to bed every night and wake up feeling fabulous.  Currently, Dr. Dennis wears a sleep apnea dental device that has a built in NTI component. Dr. Dennis also addresses the nutrition spigot with daily ViaViente, and Dr. Cindy has done food allergy testing. Dr. Cindy also handles the hormone spigot by taking bio-identical hormones. Both Docs turn down their musculo-skeletal spigots with chiropractic care, acupuncture, and massage therapy.