WOW! I have never considered how much time and energy Migraines steal from your life.
Literally. Steffi started having migraines at 5 years old and every migraine steals a day of her life. Two really, because the day after is recovery day. Read how she relieved 39 years of weekly migraines.
Sometimes just one a month, but more often one per week or more. That means close to 30% of her life was devoted to dealing with migraines. By averaging that to every other week over 39 years, she lost over FIVE YEARS to her migraine headaches.
I consider her a “warrior”. By the time she found us here at True Health the migraines had taken its toll on her health. This has led to many other health issues. I consider her strong because she was pushing through exhaustion, insomnia, and brain fog. She also experienced severe cramping and mood swings with her monthly cycles.
The resulting physical consequences of these issues meant breaks while climbing stairs to catch her breath, wool socks and mittens for hands and feet that didn’t receive the warmth of blood circulating properly and it also meant times where her heart would feel like it was going to pound right out of her chest.
When she visited True Health, she listed only the migraines. She only cared about the pain that interrupted her life. She was tough enough to battle through the rest.
But I’m not a real doctor, or so I’ve been told many times, and yes our results are unreal by comparison. I’ve begun to use “healer,” and healers care for all parts of you! In her experience, over 39 years and starting as a little girl, her doctors couldn’t help her vulnerabilities, so perhaps her request was influenced by low expectations.
Well, to be fair, they provided Imitrex injections, which would relieve her migraines once triggered. When she didn’t have the injection available to her,it meant puking to the point of dry heaves and a short stay in the hospital to recover, which was an “enormous financial cost,” in her own words.
She was financially and physically motivated to find a better solution to her migraines. When considering her options, a friend and patient of True Health, told her to try “my healer.”
When she shared her story with me, it was like hearing of a Warrior in battle. Every step could be a landmine, and “blow up” her next couple days. She listed the triggers she had clearly observed: Two days before her period, sugar, alcohol, perfumes, cleaning chemicals, (any strong smell), gluten, citrus, nuts and stress! I’ll share what they all have in common in a minute. It actually makes sense, when you know the way a body works.
She was taking thyroid hormone replacement, which elevated her energy to 4 out of 10. Tired usually indicates sleep, but for some reason sleep eluded her.
She had Imitrex injections for when she couldn’t bear the pain, but that had a price to her body, which she paid with growing regularity in order to save her brain.
The medical perspective of migraines is that it is a genetically endowed weakness that makes the stress centers of your brain activate when exposed to certain foods, chemicals, stress, and high estrogen. The stress of these exposures, which is insignificant to people who do not have this genetic weakness, causes the brain activity to slow down, and the blood vessels in the brain to swell. Think of someone blowing up a balloon inside your head, within your brain, behind your eye. It hurts.
She explained that the pain of her migraines hurt so badly that she would throw up!
I’ve thrown up from pain one time. It was appendicitis, and Oh-My the pain. My wife threw up birthing our first baby. Imagine that intensity of pain, in your brain! Imagine appendicitis, or the pain of childbirth inside your brain, on a weekly basis!
One of the stressors, or what they call “triggers,” is a substance in certain foods, including the ones on her list of “no-nos,” called Tyramine. For most of us, it is just food. But for Steffi, it was poison. According to medicine, your best course is to have Imitrex on hand, and give yourself a shot when the warning signs begin.
Steffi is a smart woman, in addition to her toughness. In her spare time, after she makes a living designing your heart expression to the world through a beautiful website, she begins “work,” which to her is saving our planet.
But any idiot would avoid lemons if they made you hurt so badly that you puke when you eat them.
She was eating healthy food and avoiding triggers, well, all triggers except one! Stress! Instead of relaxing after work, she is an unpaid citizen lobbyist who pushes for a bipartisan solution to climate change in what is considered to be the most divisive (defined: “tending to cause disagreement and hostility”) topic in Congress at the moment. But she’d take a bullet for Mother Earth, so that trigger she didn’t avoid.
Following the best advice she was offered over 39 years, she was taking 7 injections a month. Some months, she would have taken more, but Medicine’s playbook says “more than that will kill you.” Imitrex causes vascular constriction, which pushes the air out of the balloon behind your eye, but it has the same “tightening” effect on the heart.
Remember the shortness of breath climbing stairs, cold hands, and heart pounding out of her chest? Well, that’s a noted side effect of her healing medicine. It contracts and fatigues the heart, and if you take too much of this medicine, you die from a heart attack.
What an interesting resource. I tell my patients, the more Plant Medicines you take, the less you need them. Pharmaceuticals seem to have the opposite effect. The more you take them, the more you need them.
One of my professors shared a study where researchers examined the side effect frequency of pharmaceutical medicine and found that with just one pharmaceutical, there was an 10% chance that it was the cause of one of your symptoms. The percentage increased with each medicine added, and by the time they reached five drugs, there was a 100% certainty that at least one pain or problem was caused by your treatment. And some people are taking more than TEN!
When I finally met Steffi, 39 years after the onsetof her migraines, everything was getting worse.
My job is to diagnose the “Root Cause.” Yes, her parents were part of the problem, but Nature Already Knows that we ALL have strengths and weaknesses, and nature has a response to those needs. My job is to meet the need of every vulnerability and when you support weakness, you discover strength.
Dr. Bruce Ames, who you’ve probably never heard of, because he doesn’t make anyone billions of dollars, has found that nourishment, very precise nourishment, strengthens the genetic weaknesses we all have. You just have to know what part of nature will strengthen you.
Genetic weakness, according to Dr. Ames, just means that you are really good at something else, and Steffi’s weakness was detoxification. Detoxification is not a program or procedure, it’s a process. The last week of a female cycle is elimination week. Estrogen rises with the moon to tell an egg to release from an ovary. Then rises again with progesterone after ovulation, to prepare the uterus for implantation of the fertilized egg. If there is not fertilization, the uterine lining sheds, and the liver binds and eliminates thehormones that offer life expansion, bringing estrogen levels back down to start another cycle.
Dr. Ames looked at basic biochemistry, and found that folate facilitates that process, so with Steffi’s genetic weakness, we gave her Rosemary, which has more folate content than all other plants measured except one, and exactly what Dr. Ames has found strengthens this genetic vulnerability, a special kind of folate with an interesting name, abbreviated “MTHFR.”
It speeds up the capability of eliminating estrogen which protects you from fibroids, endometriosis, and breast cancer. It also aids the elimination of environmental toxins, such a lead, which was her next vulnerability. Lead was used in gasoline and paints up until 1978, when it became exceedingly obvious that it caused developmental delays in children, memory loss in adults, and heart stress.
It takes Mother Earth many years to process and filter the poisons we burden Her with. Steffi was born in the peak of lead usage, and by the time it was banned, she was already a regular migraine sufferer. Peak exposure, and weak elimination, revealed her vulnerability as her first migraine at the tender age of five.
To help her eliminate lead toxicity, I nourished her body with N-Acetyl Cysteine or NAC. It’s an amino acid that is naturally occurring in all proteins, and exceptionally so in whey, one of the proteins in dairy. But she was past a glass of milk for healing, so we added a therapeutic dose of NAC, alongside her other caretakers, Rosemary and Folate.
And a plant medicine I’m sure you’ve heard of called Dandelion.
Yes, the “weed” our culture sprays poison on, is detoxifying and healing. It improves the efficiency of the liver and kidneys, our primary organs of elimination, along with the large intestine which eliminates all the “crap” we don’t need.
After just two weeks of “meeting needs,” she reports that her energy is increasing and she feels happier.
Three weeks after starting these “unscientific” medicines and nutrients, she has a period with no cramping, but her moodiness was still severe.
Healers meet healing needs, and she needed help with her lead detoxification. I prescribed cilantro, another spice in the cabinet, that moonlights as a plant medicine. It binds to lead and leads it to the large intestine for elimination with the rest of the crap.
As we eased toxic lead out of her body, her cycle relaxed and she had NO mood swings or pain with her next, and she reported that her “anxiety is very under control.”
That’s called a “healing trend.” If you wish for a healing trend, dandelion and this special folate are in both True Detox and True PMS Relief in our online store.
Three months after starting care at True Health, she begins to see a clear trend with her migraines. For the first time in 39 years, the intensity is decreasing rather than increasing. She hasn’t had a severe, lose your lunch migraine in 2 months and rates her energy as 8 out of 10!
At 4 months, she is pushing her body physically, and notices some return of cramping with her cycle. I see this in every healing story. As energy, strength and life return, we stretch and discover our new limits. But what a FUN thing to explore, a new expanded limit to your stress capacity! I encourage my patients to expend their rediscovered energy on something called “heart expression.” Express your passion, your “what matters most”…to the limits of your energy.
And I’ll care for the wounds of your exertion.
Steffi was chopping wood to heat her home, because her passion is saving our planetary Mother, and of course, staying alive to achieve her goal.
But even pushing her body physically, she reports that her headache intensity is decreased by 50%!
I once had a sinus headache that was unbearable, and found that laying perfectly still lowered it to just excruciating. I was so appreciative of that tiny bit of relief. Imagine cutting your pain in half!
We also had her hormone lab back. We ran a full cycle hormone panel, where she collects saliva every other day for 28 days, allowing us to observe her hormones in motion. Estrogen is a known trigger for migraines, so we wanted to see exactly what was going on through her cycle. And yes, as is typical she would have a premenstrual migraine or two, just less severe now.
The lab revealed that her pituitary hormones were all low. I prescribed a plant called Eleuthero that boldly grows in the harshest conditions of Siberia, and appears to impart that resilience to humans when ingested. Eleuthero has over 500 studies published in the National Library of Medicine, including one from Japan documenting an ability to increase pituitary hormones.
At five months, she hadn’t had to use her heart weakening injection for 2 months! If she did get a headache, she could find relief from massage. Just creating space for her heart to gain strength, gave her the ability run up stairs, stay warm when it was cold out, and keep her heart beating softly and efficiently in her chest.
At six months, she reports 2 cycles in a row with NO migraines using Eleuthero!
But she’s still finding her limits. Ice cream triggered a migraine of moderate intensity, and a fun filled pizza and beer night left her needing the relief of her Imitrex injection for the first time in MONTHS.
We added a plant from South America called Maca. Inca warriors ate large quantities of the root before going into battle. This increased their stamina, ferocity, and strength in battle has been attributed to Maca. Her genetic weakness was met with basic nutrition, Now she was asking for stamina, ferocity and strength.
Leading to a new personal record! She experiences 2 months of no headaches of any intensity!
Around a year after visiting True Health, she is expanding her energy. She is marching on Washington to fight ignorance. (Anyone harming our Mother Earth, would qualify as ignorant, is that fair?) She is arguing her points, with stamina, ferocity and strength. The increased intensity of stress finds her new limit. But like a warrior in battle, she accepts the consequence of another puking level migraine. She has to hurt her heart to relieve the pain by Imitrix injection, but she is gathering a sense of how to heal now.
When you lean on nature to heal, you find less need for doctors, so our visits are stretching out. Our genetically vulnerable Warrior is expressing passion in the media, and finds the larger the audience, the more the stress. She battles through three migraines in one week for her (our) cause.
But this visit to True Health, she also reports that she feels so strong. She stopped taking her thyroid medicine, and has more energy than ever. And she LOOKS strong! She said she walked in front of the mirror after a shower, and was impressed with her toned and muscular body. “I look good naked!”
Yes, that’s how it works. When you fight with a passion in your belly, even willing to endure pain, and you have a healer for your doctor, to care for your wounds, you get (and look) stronger and stronger.
Apparently we have a poor “business” model at True Health, because Steffi only needed ONE doctor visit this year. With less care than ever before, a new record was reported: 3 months with NO migraines!
She said she was explaining this journey to her friends, who had never heard of such a thing. They said, “Let me get this straight, the more you see your doctor, the less you need him? The more medicine you take, the less you need them?”
Yes, that’s how it works, when you lean on nature, the very thing she is fighting to protect, and she still leans pretty heavily. If she would relax and read a book, take a candlelight bath, and sleep to her body’s content, she would probably “need” less of nature at this point. But she has work to do, after “work.” The first shift of work is to ensure her security. The second is to ensure “ours.”
Steffi is the Warrior, and I am the Caretaker. I know that is backward in our culture, but we are a “team” with intense passion for nature. I have a feeling that many generations will be talking about what Steffi and Dr. Stone accomplished forthe greater good. But I’m not a fortune teller. I just know that natural law states, “the more impassioned of two forces wins the war, regardless of size difference.”
Are you gathering the amazing potential of plant medicines? Every natural medicine I use has a rich history, scientific validation, and AMAZING healing qualities. They meet body needs to heal and offer strength and resilience. Pharmaceutical medicines offer suppression of symptoms, slowing disease progression, and side effects.
How in the world did we ever come to believe that pharmaceuticals are better than Mother Nature? Could it be the influence of billion dollar corporations?
True Health and Mother Nature now offer care without expectation. We’ve been pushed out of way by profit, and our fighting back is a True Health Membership. It’s 7 dollars a month, and it allows you to visit True Health whenever you need, on a donation basis. Whatever you want to pay.
“As a 40 year-old who has suffered with migraines my whole life, I was sick of doctors pushing pills on me and never helping me figure out my triggers. I wasn’t getting any better, in fact I was getting worse — to the point of taking 7 shots a month of Imetrex and that was the max they could give me!
The next step was to put me on a daily anti-seizure medication at that point. I couldn’t understand why I was only getting worse and not better and taking so much more medication! I decided to seek out an alternative doctor like Dr. Stone at the strong urging of a friend who was treated for allergies and got well under his care.
Two years later I am off ALL medications for migraines and even my thyroid medication and feeling the healthiest I have ever been in years!! My my energy is back, moods have calmed down, I sleep better at night, my body doesn’t ache anymore, my anxiety and breathing issues have gone away, and overall I am a much happier person who feels thankful for having found Dr. Stone! I highly recommend him to anyone! Just ask the lab techs who perform Dr. Stone’s lab testing how happy his patients are. They will confirm the same and they work for Quest Diagnostics.”
Now I was sweating. I didn’t understand what I was seeing, and I didn’t know what to do about it! Was I in over my head? I nervously proceeded with my best effort.
I don’t think PMS is “normal.” It’s a symptom of imbalance and body needs. What did she need to find comfort?
bulges without severe trauma. I remembered a professor describing this possibility, but I hadn’t seen it in a patient before. The infected organs cause spasm of a muscle called the Psoas. It crosses your hip and it’s attached to the spine above. When it spasms, it pulls on the spine, causing multiple discs to bulge.
“I share my story to share hope. You never know where the right answer will be, but with determination and a willingness to try anything, I found relief.”