Your migraine isn’t a sentence in your genes. It’s a hungry, over-excitable brain.
You leave the surgery with a prescription for a triptan and the line “it runs in the genes”. Yet an attack most often doesn’t fall from the sky. It’s a signal that the brain isn’t getting stable fuel and is short of what it uses to quieten excitement. Migraine is one of the leading causes of years lived with disability, especially in young women.
By the afternoon a shadow appears behind one eye, light begins to sting, sounds get too loud, and you already know that in an hour you won’t be able to think. You draw the curtains, lie down in a dark room and count out the hours, sometimes a whole day that migraine simply takes from you.
Sometimes before the pain come shimmering zigzags or numbness of a hand. And then that washed-out day after the attack, when your head is clear but you feel like you’ve been through the washing machine.
It isn’t “a stronger sort of headache” and it isn’t your weakness. It’s an episodic disturbance of how the brain works, one you have a real say over.
“You’ve got migraine in your genes, nothing can be done about it.”
That line closes the subject before it’s begun. The genes set the excitability threshold, yes, but they don’t decide how many times a month that threshold is crossed. What really pulls the trigger sits in the diet, the hormones and the way you live, that is, in things you can change.
There’s another way. It starts with understanding why this brain is so flammable, and with a few numbers from your blood that nobody has shown you until now.
This isn’t a guide about miracles or “getting rid of migraine in two weeks”. It’s a practical guide: how to understand the mechanism and give the brain the conditions in which the attacks are fewer and weaker. No magic, no scaremongering, no promises nobody can keep. Migraine prevention is a game of months, not days, and I say that plainly at the very start.
Inside, I break down what you usually don’t hear with the prescription:
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The migraine brain has a low threshold for excitement. During an attack a slow wave of over-excitement and quietening passes through it (cortical spreading depression), and then the trigeminal nerve system activates.
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It’s above all an energy crisis of the neuron. The brain is the most ravenous organ, and in migraine a deficit of mitochondrial energy metabolism has been described. Hence the whole logic of riboflavin and coenzyme Q10.
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The sugar swing is a classic trigger. The post-meal dip (reactive hypoglycaemia) fires off attacks especially in the morning and after a long gap without food, which is why steadying blood sugar is sometimes the fastest intervention.
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Magnesium literally quietens the excitability of neurons. It blocks the NMDA receptor and regulates the calcium channels, and people with migraine, especially women with menstrual migraine, have a lowered active, ionised fraction that the usual serum normal doesn’t show.
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In women the attacks cluster around the period. They’re triggered not by low oestrogen itself, but by its sharp fall just before the bleed.
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Migraine has a sex. It affects women far more often than men, and in women the attacks last longer and come back more often.
What's inside
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An “is this you?” test — a short picture of symptoms to tick off (side of the pain, aura, light sensitivity, attacks before the period, the pain of hunger and the weekend pain).
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A markers table — what to ask for and how to read the results: RBC magnesium, glucose and insulin with HOMA-IR, vitamin D, ferritin, TSH/fT3/fT4, homocysteine, B12 and folate, hs-CRP, electrolytes. The lab “normal” versus the functional optimum.
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An attack and food diary — the cheapest and most powerful tool for spotting your personal triggers (red wine, ripened cheeses, sweeteners, the withdrawal of coffee).
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Supplements step by step — with rough ranges (magnesium, riboflavin, coenzyme Q10, vitamin D with K2, omega-3, preventive herbs) and the skill of reading labels: form and purity, not the brand name.
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Migraine scenarios — menstrual, of hunger and dysglycaemia, with aura, weekend, chronic from medication overuse, a child, pregnancy. Different migraines, different roads.
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A printable tests checklist — you take to the lab, an end to being fobbed off with “all normal”.
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A 90-day plan — month by month: stable fuel, charging the mitochondria, review and fine-tune.
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A shopping list to start — what goes in the basket, what to bin from the cupboard.
This is for you if
- ✓you have more and more days with pain and more and more tablets in the drawer
- ✓the attacks come back before your period
- ✓the pain comes from hunger, in the morning or at the weekend
- ✓you have aura and want to understand what to actually do
- ✓all you hear is “it’s the genes, take a triptan” and you feel that’s not enough
This isn't for you if
- ✕you’re after a tablet “for right now” without changing your lifestyle
- ✕you want a ready-made diet without understanding why the brain needs it
Working on the cause isn’t an experiment to run on your own. In the guide you have clear headache red flags where naturopathy steps into the background and the first move belongs to a doctor, sometimes urgently: a sudden, very severe pain, “the worst of your life”, that builds in seconds; pain with fever and a stiff neck; pain with persisting neurological deficits (weakness, speech disturbance, loss of part of the field of vision). These aren’t situations you wait on, but a call to 999, or 111 for urgent advice. You also have a hard rule about medicines there: if you reach for triptans or painkillers too many days a month, you withdraw them with a doctor, not on your own. And if you have migraine with aura and the combined oestrogen contraceptive pill, that’s a separate matter for an urgent conversation with a doctor. Naturopathy doesn’t compete with emergency medicine, and it never should.
Your brain isn’t broken. It’s responding to the conditions you keep it in.
Migraine is most often a hungry, under-energised and over-excitable organ, not a punishment written into the genes. You give it stable fuel, charge the mitochondria, top up what it uses to quieten excitement, and take away its reasons to fire. Change the conditions and the brain answers. It’s not a sentence and not a triptan prescription for life.
Migraines — have it right now
The PDF lands in your inbox the moment you pay. Read it on your phone, tablet or computer. Your copy is marked with your details (a named licence), for your own use.
Migraine rarely travels alone. With the Any three guides bundle you pick any three for less, while All-Access gives you the lot at once. See the bundles.
“The first material that made me understand where my attacks come from, not just what to drown them out with. Written plainly, with a concrete list of tests for the lab.”
A guide hands you the map. If you would rather go through your case with me, with a plan built around your results and your medication, come to a consultation.
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