The Migraine Treatment Guide Podcast
Medications, Procedures, and Surgery Explained for the management of chronic headaches, including migraine, tension headache, cluster headache, NDPH, and other headache diagnoses. Created and edited by Dr. Adam Lowenstein of the Migraine Surgery Specialty Center, this podcast covers diagnosis, medication, surgical, and non-surgical alternatives to headache medication in order to educate patients with chronic headache pain on their options for headache relief.
Episodes
21 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 inc...
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 l...
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 tr...
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 re...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
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 migrain...
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 struc...
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...
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...
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 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 ne...
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 a...
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...
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...
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...
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 fea...
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...