A New Approach to Headaches in Santa Barbara, CA

An approach that provides relief in 93% of patients

For too long, headache and migraine pain has been treated as a medical issue, with attempts to address the physiology rather than the anatomy of the painful symptoms.

Neurologists often think about headaches in terms of physiology, where headache pains are caused by chemical imbalances, reactions inside the brain and pain signals between cells inside the brain. This approach uses medication to block these chemical reactions as the primary treatment for headaches. Sometimes, medications do work.

However, patients vary vastly in their symptoms and reactions to treatment, and some medications work better than others. Neurologists and headache patients alike have learned that there are no medications that work consistently in all patients. For example, commercials for one of the newest migraine medications (a CGRP inhibitor) claim to prevent up to 50% of migraine pain when doses are repeated. While this medication attempts to block some of the chemicals that transmit pain associated with migraines, it’s not entirely useful for all migraine pains.

New research centered around the anatomy of migraine pain has further revealed the causes for these chemical imbalances. In many cases, the causes of migraine headaches lie primarily outside the brain – mainly in the peripheral nerves of the head and neck. Irritated and compressed nerves that lie in the neck muscles or just under the skin of the forehead seem to be what triggers the cycle of pain in the brain.

Fortunately, these nerves can be easily accessed using minimally invasive outpatient decompression procedures. Nerve decompression allows these nerves to lie in a much more relaxed state, no longer triggering pain in the brain.