Alternative Migraine Treament Reader Comments

[Re: "Where Does it Hurt", by Joan Raymond, July]: Help is already here for the migraine sufferer. I have been a chiropractor for 34 years and have helped thousands of people with this condition. Many of these patients could not be helped by the traditional "drug therapy." Ms. Raymond didn't even mention chiropractic as an alternative. [She] uses references that date back to the 1940s, but she forgot one of the largest alternatives. I had no idea that there were people out there that din't know chiropractic adjustments help migraine sufferers.

As a licensed Naturopathic doctor I wanted to propose some natural treatments for migraines and their ability to create symptom relief and often cure this debilitating disease. Natural medicine offers multiple healing modalities for people with migraines including nutritional support, elimination of food allergies, botanical medicines, and homeopathy. Each migraine patient is different, and treatment is tailored to the individual based on his or her own specific needs. Individual needs are determined through patient history, symptom picture, and functional laboratory testing.
Naturopathic medicine provides natural health alternatives to pharmaceuticals, while aimed towards treating the cause of the disease. To find out more about Naturopathic Medicine or to find a licensed Naturopathic doctor near you, go to http://www.naturopathic.org.

Thank you for the article on migraines, but it was rather shortsighted. I suffered migraines from age 12 to 26 -- until I got help. Further reading led me to an easy cure. One melatonin pill per day (very cheap and all natural) changed my life. Please make more effort to give a fully rounded approach and not be the mouthpiece for the drug firms who make so much money on all these conditions. Please take the opportunity to spread information that is useful, safe, and life altering. How many woman who have hormonally induced monthly migraines might enjoy the same success as me?

Joan Raymond does your readers both a service and a disservice in her coverage of migraine headaches. The services she provides is in highlighting an impotant and treatable health condition and in emphasizing the importance of correct diagnosis and treatment. The disservice is in implying that the only treatment worth mentioning is medication. In fact, psychological methods, such as self-administered relaxation training (when a migraine episode is beginning), are effective, safe, and permanently and universally potable, once an individual learns the technique.
Moreover, such psychological approaches lack side effects, lack conflicts with other medications a person may be taking, and do not require ongoing visits to a medical doctor and pharmacy for prescriptions. Thus, in the long run, a psychological approach may be much less expensive. Once again, in our culture's current obsession with pills, many time-tested and even superior treatment approaches may be overlooked, to the detriment of those who suffer with serious, yet treatable, conditions.

Joan Raymond responds:
The fact that there is The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health, is testament to the fact that Western medicine is becoming much more aware of the potential healing benefits for many diseases with non-traditional approaches like naturopathic medicine, chiropractic and acupuncture treatment, among a long list of others.
Among the Center's goals are to support research on complementary and alternative medicine and to get information to the public and professionals on which treatments work, which do not, and why. That, however, is a subject that is deserving of its own piece. No single magazine article with limited space can cover all aspects of care and research for any disease, let alone migraine, a complex, neurobiological illness that defies a one-size-fits-all scenario.
My article was specifically focuseed on inroads in migraine management made by those medical doctors who see the majority of headache patients -- primary-care providers. The nation's two largest medical specialty groups representing these doctors, the American College of Physicians--American Society of Internal Medicine and the American Academy of Family Physicians, developed evidence-based guidelines for migraine treatment after careful review of available scientific literature. This is a positive move, whether you agree with the guidelines or not.

The good news is that we are no longer in a time when migraine is taken about as seriously as a rash. The important message for migraineurs, it seems, is that their disease remains, obviously, on everyone's radar screen. That will hopefully result in more research, leading to a better understanding of the disease, and more scientific evidence of what treatments -- traditional, alternative, or some combination -- really do work best to help those with the disease called migraine.

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