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Woke up with a pounding head out of nowhere?
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Today, we dive into why migraines can suddenly appear,
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even if you've never had one before,
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yet it's becoming your new norm in a very scary way.
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Migraine Heroes is a podcast for chronic migraine sufferers
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who've seen countless doctors with no results.
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Learn how to reduce your migraine attacks
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without endless medications or constant sacrifices.
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Hello, I'm Diane Ducarme.
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I've helped over 500 people break free from migraine,
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even after suffering for up to 60 years.
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My mission in life?
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To bring this relief to a million people
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using a unique blend of Eastern medicine and Western science.
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In this episode, you will learn
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why a first-ever migraine can happen,
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even in adulthood,
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due to triggers or changes in your body systems.
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How trying to fix it can backfire fast,
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turning occasional pain into something chronic.
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What practical step you can take today
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to put an end to the chaos.
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Stay with me until the end,
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knowing that science will empower
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your first lines of defense,
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leveraging the smartness of your brain, even in pain.
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I decided to do this episode
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because just this morning,
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I onboarded a woman whose first migraine attack
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happened only four weeks ago.
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She was in total disarray.
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She'd already been to the emergency room a few times.
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I want to say four out of memory,
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even if that sounds like a lot.
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She had seen an ophthalmologist, a GP, a neurologist,
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had done an MRI and a CD scan.
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And in the end, she's been told,
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so far, it's genetic, it's your new normal,
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and you need to accept it and to medicate.
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Yes, her father has had migraines his whole life,
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but she's asking, why me?
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What do you mean a new norm?
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She's lost, she's confused, and more than anything,
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she's gone from never needing any medication
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to being on all sorts of medications in just a few weeks.
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She felt alone and isolated.
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She felt different from everyone else.
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And aside from a bit too much screen time,
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a little more stress than usual,
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and maybe a few glasses of wine,
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there's nothing obvious that explains
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the excruciating pain in her brain,
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the vision loss, the numbness in the arms and legs,
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and the nerve pain.
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Her husband sat on our call and listens to everything.
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And when I meet someone like that, anyone like that,
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it becomes my mission to get them back on their feet,
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to help them turn this chapter into just a faint memory,
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so she can go on living her life,
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running the business she created
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with her husband and her two children.
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Now, had we not met, something would have happened,
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because I have met her before.
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I've met her at 36, the age she's now.
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I've also met her at 46, at 56, at 66, at 76, and at 86,
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each time carrying an extra decade of pain.
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But today I feel so grateful
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because we can reverse that trend and we can do it quickly.
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So in this episode, I want to talk you through
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what happened in her body, what shifted,
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both from a Western and Eastern medicine perspective,
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and how without even realizing it,
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she was already on her way
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to becoming a chronic migraine sufferer for life.
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If that is you, in a distant memory,
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embrace that story and put yourself back in time.
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Know that it's never too late to heal.
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Your body wants to and knows how to do so,
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so that story is for you as well.
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Now, let's start from the West.
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What do we know here?
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We know, first of all, that migraines are genetic.
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There's 1 to 128 Shins lucky
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known to be responsible for migraines.
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And while that is super impressive, we can prove that,
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it's also fundamentally not practical.
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What are you going to do?
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Thank your mom and thank your dad
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and do a big prayer for your children and grandchildren?
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The second thing that we know
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is that because it's genetic,
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it's 5% of boys and girls who have migraines.
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That's logical, right?
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Mother nature being fair.
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However, we've noticed in the West
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that the incidence of migraines
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is going to triple to quadruple for women at puberty,
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leaving 18% of women,
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and now we even talk about 21% of women in the US,
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So if you feel alone like Cecilia,
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trust me on this, you are not. This
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is just a well-guarded sort of secret,
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one that requires intimacy
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and a ton of unconditional empathy to be talked about.
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The third thing that we know from the West
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is that we have a gut-brain axis.
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Now that starts to be a lot more pragmatic.
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That means concretely that your brain
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gives orders to your gut, which we've always known,
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but now your gut can give orders to your brain as well.
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So it means technically that with what you eat,
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we can access your brain,
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and it's a lot more pragmatic.
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That was discovered and proven in the West
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about 15 to 20 years ago,
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and used in traditional Chinese medicine
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for about 2,000 to 5,000 years.
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The last thing we know from a Western perspective
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is that we have a vagus nerve,
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and that has been discovered a much longer time ago,
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about 200 years ago in the West,
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because if you dissect a body,
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you will find the vagus nerve.
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So imagine a tree that plants its roots
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around your heart, around your lungs,
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around your small, large intestine,
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around your stomach, around your liver,
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and forms large roots along your spine,
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collates the hundred billion nerve cells in your body,
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and forms a trunk in your neck.
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It's gonna plug in your brain like an electrical car.
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And I say that because the brain is super dense,
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and you would hope to see all of these wires
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to go to specific places,
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but Mother Nature has its mysteries,
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and those cables get into the brain via the trigeminal nerve
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and form from a Western perspective,
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and we have no clue as to where these wires
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end up in the brain.
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And I don't say that lightly.
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At Migrant Heroes, we take care of doctors,
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of nurses, and of pharmacists,
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and they all agree with that statement.
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We just don't know.
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That's a great fun of decade ahead
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for beautiful discoveries in neurology, formidable.
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Meanwhile, you need help today.
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Okay, so we have some gems and some question marks
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from a Western perspective,
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with four things that are useful,
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some very pragmatic, some less.
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In the East, they were not trying to do that.
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They were not trying to prove things scientifically,
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or have a name on a paper,
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or create a company that sells pharmaceutical
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and that has shareholders, or become very famous.
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What they were trying to do was,
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they were in charge of people in a village,
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and they were trying to have people like Cecilia
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up and about at work,
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up and about and taking care of their families.
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And when they were not, because they had a migraine attack,
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well, people wouldn't look at Cecilia to blame her.
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They'd look at the doctor for not doing a good job.
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So what they were just trying to do
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was to have people alive, symptom-free,
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to be able to do the small and the large things
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they needed to achieve in life, okay?
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And so what they discovered over thousands of years,
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doing this on millions and billions of people,
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was that if you were having a number of symptoms,
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if you were trying to remove the root cause of a symptom,
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not only would that given symptom disappear,
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the other symptoms that pertained to that family
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and that root cause would disappear as well.
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And if that person was suffering from migraines and headache,
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and you had tackled the root cause
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of their given migraine or headache,
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the pain would go away as well.
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So really early on,
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they discovered that migraine pain
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was more like a fire alarm, like a signal,
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and wasn't the problem itself.
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And what is really interesting is that in 2002,
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Dr. Elizabeth Lauder from Harvard Medical School
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wrote this incredible paper
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that says, what is the genetic advantage of migraine disease?
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And basically she poses the fact that
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how come mother nature would have left a fifth of women
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with a genetic predisposition for what?
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Their membranes being cuckoo?
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She doesn't believe that.
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I don't believe that either.
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So what was the genetic advantage of migraine
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that allowed these people with migraine predisposition
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survive over and over again?
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And in that paper, she refers to the migraine
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like a fire alarm, just like I do on an everyday basis.
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Now, why would you have migraine in the first place?
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That is the object of what I discuss with people
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in the diagnostic call.
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It's a 90 minutes call.
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And this morning with Cecilia, it took me a whole two hours.
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And I really don't mind because I think fundamentally,
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you need to understand in plain language
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what has happened to you and why.
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So let me brush over some of the common
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first migraine triggers I've seen.
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I will brush over quickly because here,
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there is nothing you can do retrospectively, okay?
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However, there are many things you can do moving forward.
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And I want to focus a bit more on that.
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But let me list out a lot of the things that I've seen
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were triggering that first instance of migraine.
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I've seen trauma in childhood, a poor digestion,
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puberty kicking in, a traumatic brain injury
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like a concussion, excess alcohol in teenage years
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that looked like a hangover,
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but seems suddenly disproportionately more than others,
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intense periods of stress, burnout,
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post-pregnancy recovery, blood donation,
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exposure to heavy metals, excess medication
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for another disease, contraception,
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a change of location of city, a divorce,
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breastfeeding, going through perimenopause,
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a stomach bug caught in a tropical country.
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These are some of the things that I've seen
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would go from the absence of migraine
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for the gene of migraine to just declare itself.
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So if these incidents happened to you,
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I'm not saying that the migraine kicked in right after,
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but that it led to a domino effect of problems
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that subsequently led to repeated migraine attacks.
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In the case of Cecilia, it was a mix of too much screen,
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more stress, and wine all combined at the same time
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that provoked a first massive aura.
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But here's the thing, in her quest to solve the migraine,
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in her quest to go and see experts,
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doctors and these experts made it worse.
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And yes, I'm a bit harsh on my language here,
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but I'm also being very factual
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based on everything that I've seen worldwide.
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That aura was hammered with medication
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and an examination in her case of the pupil
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to dilate it, that led to massive light
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imposed on her eyes,
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that led to another massive migraine attack.
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And a few emergency room visits
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that led to a lot of migraine cocktails
[10:59]
and so more medications
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until she was then getting migraines on a daily basis.
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So what's with all of that?
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Let's imagine your house starts to be on fire
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and that your fire alarm goes on.
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If you start running like madness to extinguish it
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and run it in the whole house to put a ladder
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and a hammer to hammer your alarm box,
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because that's what you're told,
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it is likely that you're going to make things worse.
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Is because at the core of all the root causes
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that can give migraines is your liver system.
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You see, I speak seven languages
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and let me explain how it relates.
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I speak seven languages
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and you might hear that from my accent.
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So I have a French speaking accent.
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It's not quite French. It comes from Belgium
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and my mother tongue's French,
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but in Belgium, if you only speak French,
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you can't really have a job.
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So you have to learn Flemish.
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Now with French and Flemish, trust me,
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you don't really leave your country.
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So really quickly on, you have to add on English.
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And I went a bit overboard and I learned seven languages,
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but it's almost like I only speak two.
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I speak West and I speak Mandarin.
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And if you say liver in a West term,
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you always designate the piece of flesh
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below your right ribcage.
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I promise you it's all going to make sense.
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And if you say gan in Mandarin,
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you do not designate that piece of flesh.
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What you designate is the liver, the gallbladder,
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all of your female hormones, all of your mood hormones,
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all of your tendons, your breast, your uterus,
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your brain, a lot of your brain,
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your temples, your eyebrows, and the top of your head.
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You designate your ability to detox
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and you designate your eyes, so that aura.
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Now, when relentlessly you are told to medicate
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to get rid of the pain,
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you will add more and more toxicity to your liver
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and make the migraine worse
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and go from being episodic to chronic.
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So the more you will see specialists,
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the more you are likely to medicate.
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And the more you will medicate,
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the more you will be in pain.
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Now, it's proven in Western science
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that a lot of medications give rebound migraines.
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Like if you think of tryptamines
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or over-the-counter medications,
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there was also a scandal with opioids.
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But based on the episode on thiamine and histamine,
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now you know that antidepressants and antibiotics
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and over-the-counter medications for migraines
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also inhibits the breakdown of histamine
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and therefore fuel to the fire.
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So that is how, by trying to solve the problem,
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you start little by little to dodge yourself
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and to believe, hey, this might be me
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and this might be for the rest of my life.
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And the answer is to medicate for a lifetime.
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And maybe I need to stop complaining
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and stop finding solutions.
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And maybe I am depressed and maybe I am anxious.
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And maybe this is just life, the way it's designed for me.
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And this is happening every day, all over the globe.
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I am, we are at Migraine Heroes to change that.
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We make those small miracles happen every day.
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And so had I not met Cecilia today,
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she would have gone in that journey of more medications
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and more throwing more solutions at her system,
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making her system fall into a domino effect
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that would have become more and more complex.
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But something in Cecilia made her believe
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that there was something else, that something was possible,
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that she hadn't had them for so long.
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And so my one ask today is that, you know, this is not you.
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Being in pain is not a state.
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Let me give you one example.
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Let's imagine you broke your knee for a minute
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and you go to the doctor and you say, I broke my knee.
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And he says, I'm sorry, here are some painkillers.
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And you thank him very much.
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And you take the painkillers and indeed it's going better.
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You're limping, but you're not in pain.
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So you do that for a month.
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And then after a month you go back
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and he gives you another stack of painkillers.
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And then you come back the third month
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and he gives you another stack of painkillers.
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At some point, you might wake up and say,
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hey, I hope at some point you'll fix it, right?
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Or is the plan that I have painkillers for a lifetime?
[15:07]
If your knee complains and it hurts
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and it's logical that it hurts,
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why would your brain be illogical?
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So my one ask today is, no, this is not you.
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You don't have to live a life of pain.
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We see that over and over and over again.
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So push that door.
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We're here to serve you.
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If you go on our website, margarineheroes.com,
[15:28]
you can take our margarine assessment
[15:30]
and we can meet to debrief on your profile. You
[15:34]
We also know that it doesn't need
[15:36]
and doesn't have to be that hard.
[15:38]
This is your life and we want, I want you to live it.
[15:44]
And remember, every small step you take
[15:47]
moves you closer to freedom.
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You are powerful, you are resilient,
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and you're no longer alone.
[15:54]
Keep rising, Margarine Hero.
