The Migraine Treatment Guide Podcast
This podcast focuses on the treatment of chronic headaches, including migraine, tension-type headache, cluster headache, and NDPH. It explains medications, procedures, and surgical options, as well as non-surgical alternatives to medication. Created and edited by Dr. Adam Lowenstein of the Migraine Surgery Specialty Center, the show aims to educate patients about their available options for headache relief. Coverage includes diagnosis, medical management, and both surgical and non-surgical interventions.
Episodes
Hormone Related Menstrual Headaches Explained
Menstrual migraines get framed as an invisible hormone math problem, but that story breaks down the moment you ask a simple question: if estrogen and progesterone circulate everywhere, why does the pain keep bottlenecking in the same square inch above your eyebrow or the same band at the base of your skull? We follow a different path and treat hormone-related migraines like an anatomy puzzle, wher
Post-traumatic Headache Explained
A headache that starts after a crash or a hard hit can feel exactly like migraine and that’s the problem. When the pain is throbbing, relentless, and hijacks your life, it’s natural to assume the source must be inside the skull. But there’s a lesser-known explanation that can hide in plain sight: a mechanical injury in the neck that keeps firing pain signals into the head for years.We walk through
Headaches After Illness Like COVID Explained
A headache shows up with a cold and then refuses to leave for years. That sounds like a neurological mystery, but we walk through a different possibility: a purely mechanical problem at the base of the skull where the greater occipital nerve travels through a tight, crowded corridor of muscle, fascia, blood vessels, and occipital lymph nodes.We connect the dots from reactive lymphadenopathy after
Migraine Surgery Recovery Sometimes Requires Patient's Patience
You wake up from nerve decompression surgery and the surgeon tells you it was flawless. Then, three weeks later, a migraine hits so hard you start wondering if you made a terrible mistake. That emotional swing is more common than most people realize, and it often has less to do with failure and more to do with how nerves actually heal after migraine surgery.We dig into peripheral nerve decompressi
Pounding Headaches Explained
“My head is pounding” sounds like a figure of speech until you realize it can be a precise anatomical report. We dig into clinical insights from Dr. Adam Lowenstein, MD, FACS, to explain how some chronic headaches and migraine-like attacks are driven by a literal collision: an artery expanding with every heartbeat and repeatedly striking a nearby sensory nerve.We map the core mechanics in plain la
Avoid Unnecessary C-spine Surgery
A chronic headache that never lets up can make you feel like you’re doing everything right and still losing ground. We start with the nightmare scenario so many people live through: years of debilitating head and neck pain, endless treatments, clean scans, and then the crushing realization that the source of the problem may have been misread from the start.We walk through the foundation of migrain
Tension Headaches Explained
Stress headaches have a reputation for being “just stress,” but we’re not buying it. We follow a precise anatomical chain that starts with a slammed inbox and ends with a real, physical injury under your skin: peripheral sensory nerves getting mechanically compressed by chronically tightened muscles.We talk through the body’s stress response in plain terms, from the HPA axis and sympathetic activa
Daith Piercing For Migraines Explained
We follow the daith piercing migraine craze from viral tears-of-joy videos to what anatomy and pain science actually say about vagus nerve claims. We explain why the relief can feel real while the mechanism is usually DNIC, placebo, and migraine’s natural cycles, then compare the piercing fad with safer evidence-based treatments. • what a daith piercing is and where it sits in ear cartilage • why
Why Neurologists Start with Beta Blockers and Antidepressants
We trace how two cornerstone migraine preventives, beta blockers and antidepressants, were discovered through surprising side effects rather than migraine-first research. We also break down how they work, why they fail so often, and why a structural diagnosis can open the door to nerve blocks and decompression surgery for a specific subset of patients. • propranolol’s path from angina drug to firs
Cold Caps For Migraine Relief Explained
Your first instinct during a migraine is often the smartest one: find something cold and press it to your forehead or the back of your neck. We follow that primal move across 3,500 years of medical history and then zoom in on the modern science that finally explains why it can work. If you have ever wondered whether cold caps are “real” migraine treatment or just a comfort ritual, we break down th
Migraine Explained
Imagine a slow wave of electrical silence crawling across the surface of the brain. That’s not horror writing, it’s one of the clearest ways to picture what migraine biology can look like up close, and it explains why calling a migraine “just a headache” misses the point. We trace the full life cycle of a migraine attack, from the prodrome that can begin up to 48 hours early (yes, including weird
Nerve Stimulators For Migraine And Cluster Headache Relief
You know that instant reflex after you bang your elbow on a doorframe, when you grab it and rub before you even think? We start there and use it to unpack a surprisingly deep idea: pain can be modulated, not just endured. That instinct sits at the heart of the gate control theory of pain and helps explain why modern neuromodulation can change how the nervous system processes migraine and other sev
The Headache Cure Hidden Near Los Angeles
A cure can be geographically close and still functionally unreachable. We start with a simple, infuriating contrast: international patients fly across oceans to Southern California for chronic migraine relief, while people in Los Angeles may never learn the same option exists a short drive away. That gap is not just about medicine. It is about how information moves, where it gets stuck, and who ge
RFA for Chronic Headaches Explained
RFA for chronic headaches sounds futuristic until you look closely at what the procedure actually does. We walk through the unfiltered mechanics of radiofrequency ablation for headache disorders, from a needle placed millimeters from critical anatomy to tissue heated hot enough to cause coagulative necrosis. If you’ve been told RFA will “quiet” a nerve, we translate that into plain language, then
Nerve Decompression Surgery for Migraines and Chronic Headaches Explained
A headache that never lets up doesn’t just hurt, it steals time, identity, and trust in your own body, especially when a clinician hints you might be exaggerating. We start with that reality and then pivot to a radically concrete idea: for some people with chronic migraine or chronic headache, the driver isn’t a “chemical imbalance,” it’s a nerve being physically trapped by muscle, fascia, or even
CGRP Inhibitors Explained
A migraine “smoking gun” is almost unheard of in medical research, yet CGRP comes shockingly close. When researchers infuse this tiny peptide into people prone to migraines, it can reliably trigger a delayed attack. That single fact changes the whole conversation, so we walk through what CGRP is, how it interacts with the trigeminal system, and why neurogenic inflammation can turn normal blood ves
Four Women Search for a Headache Pain Cure
If you’ve ever watched someone suffer with relentless migraines while every scan comes back “normal,” this conversation puts words to that quiet horror and offers a surprising mechanical explanation. We dig into the source stories behind Beyond the Pain: Triumphs of Migraine Surgery, following four women, Christine, Courtney, Vera, and Krista, as they move through years of chronic invisible pain,
NDPH Explained
A headache that begins on an ordinary Tuesday and then never stops is hard to even picture, yet that is daily life for many people living with New Daily Persistent Headache (NDPH). We unpack why NDPH is so clinically confusing: the defining feature is timing and sudden onset, but the symptoms can look like chronic migraine, chronic tension headache, or a shifting mix of both. When there is no scan
Triptans Explained
Migraine treatment used to be a blunt gamble: take a drug that hits receptors all over the body and hope it stops the attack before the side effects stop you. We walk through how that “shotgun” era of ergotamines gave way to triptans, the first real precision tool for aborting migraine, and why that shift changed headache medicine overnight. Along the way, we make a clear case for one core idea: m
Botox And Chronic Migraine
A cosmetic wrinkle shot sparked one of the strangest and most useful accidents in modern medicine: people walked into a dermatologist’s office hoping to smooth their forehead and walked out with their chronic migraines quieted. We trace how that observation turned into Botox for chronic migraine, what the PREEMPT trials actually proved, and why “chronic” has a strict definition that matters if you
Occipital Neuralgia Explained
You can swallow every pill in the cabinet and still wake up with the same brutal headache if the real problem is mechanical. We follow the evidence behind occipital neuralgia, a form of chronic head and neck pain where the occipital nerves get physically compressed by thick muscles, fascial bands, or even irritated by nearby blood vessels. When that wiring is trapped, the pain can shoot like elect
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