By Dr. David Pollack

In the over 15 years I have been in practice, I am grateful to have helped so many people get rid of lifelong headaches. My mother had severe migraines for many years stemming from a car accident. When I was an infant, the mayor’s wife of our town drunkenly T-boned my parents’ car one fateful night, sending them into a ditch. They survived, thank God. But sadly, that’s when my mother’s migraines began.  

Throughout my childhood, I witnessed how bad headaches can torment a person. My mother was often in complete misery. She took every type of medication in the hopes of easing her pain, but experienced little relief. Either the medications didn’t work at all, made her extremely low functioning, or they completely knocked her out. The triptan class of meds did help if she took them early but had awful side effects and made her feel terrible in different ways. 

Even though her headaches began from the physical trauma of a car accident—she hit her head against the passenger side window—it became clear that when she was menstruating, they got worse. Her headaches became more frequent, more painful, and less adaptable to the medications.  This phenomenon became very apparent in my Functional Medicine career. Most people with bad headaches have multiple factors affecting them.  

While in chiropractic school, I helped my mom discover multiple issues with the muscles of her neck, shoulder and even down into her lower back. Her headaches got 95 percent better. She rarely had them, and they were much less severe and more manageable.

It’s important to note my mention of her lower back issues. My mother was an endodontist, a root canal dentist. The left side of her low back was a giant knot extending the entire length of the left lumbar paraspinal musculature. This was from hunching over her patients for hours at a time. Despite being so far away from the head there was an effect in her situation from this spasm. It literally ran all the way up her back into her shoulder and neck. It was an important finding in her case. 

Fortunately, I’m relentless with figuring things out and never pigeonhole myself to just the location of pain. We likely would have gotten nowhere if I had. With that being said, I’m not suggesting that everyone with headaches has related lower back issues. In fact, there are so many different reasons for headaches. Muscles issues, blood flow, spinal misalignment, hormone imbalance, digestive problems, liver dysfunction, adrenal deficiency, shoulder issues and so many more. 

What is important in any situation is to find all the reasons you might be having headaches and deal with them all at the same time. I’ve had countless patients with decades upon decades of headaches experience real relief without drugging themselves with medications. 

There are so many reasons a person may be experiencing chronic pain. In most cases, our team at Pollack Wellness Institute can pinpoint the cause so our patients can heal and get their lives back.   

Dr. David L. Pollack is the founder of Pollack Wellness Institute, located at 66 Commack Rd., #204, Commack, NY. For appointments or information, call 631-462-0801, email [email protected] or visit PollackWellness.com.