Have a patient with recurrent migraines? Before you prescribe them another preventative medication that often times is lackluster in effectiveness, ask them about their diet. Often times, providers are trigger happy with medication prescriptions, especially with migraines when it is unnecessary.
Migraine headaches can be prevented through diet modification. Many of these patients will be eating or drinking migraine triggers on a daily basis without even knowing it. No wonder they always have a headache!
Common migraine trigger foods include cheese, processed meats, alcohol, artificial sweeteners, olives, caffeine in excess, MSG, chocolate, and yeast extracts.
I bet most people reading this eat one of those foods on at least a weekly basis. Now imagine if it caused a migraine and you didn’t even know it!
It saddens me when I have to teach chronic migrainers about diet modification in an urgent care or emergency room visit. Their PCP just kept stacking medications on them and never even mentioned diet modification.
I have seen patients with chronic migraines decrease their migraine frequency from 1-2x weekly down to once monthly through diet modification alone!
Educate your patients about the common trigger foods and watch their migraine frequency decrease without medication! This is a great PDF of common triggers you can provide your patients: https://migraine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/elimination_diet_comprehensive.pdf
2 Responses
This is awesome. Did you make the handout?
I did not, its just a very detailed and well done PDF that I have used in the past. I have seen peoples migraines practically go away when they stopped eating crap basically.