Migraines and magnesium
Migraines are sheer torture for those who suffer them. Excruciating pain from a strong light, sounds or even gentle touch along with a constant head-splitting miserable pain that can drive the victim straight to bed for hours is a typical experience among migraineurs, as they are called. Painful symptoms may or may not be preceded by an aura, which is a visual disturbance that may involve flickering lights, spots, wavy lines, etc. Disturbances of the other senses may also occur.
Migraineurs miss an average of 19.6 workdays per year on account of migraine headaches, and this costs employers an average of $3000 per year per employee. The misery of migraines is certainly most intense for the victims but also ripples out to the society at large.
Magnesium is now starting to get attention in the natural health press as being helpful for migraines, cluster headaches and tension headaches. One study showed that patients with migraines got almost immediate results for receiving 1 gram of magnesium sulfate intravenously. In 32 out of 40 patients complete elimination of migraine pain was observed within 15 minutes. Other physicians have prescribed oral magnesium oxide or other magnesium supplements, with good but slower effect.
Magnesium is one of the most common nutrient deficiencies in the United States. The average American diet is estimated to have only 250 mg of magnesium per day, whereas the average Chinese diet has 650 mg. For therapeutic purposes, it is often enough to dose 400 to 800 mg of magnesium to stop a migraine.
There is a very crude but useful formula that explains magnesium's principal effect with regard to a number of body processes. It is: "Calcium contracts; magnesium relaxes." So what happens when magnesium is relatively deficient, at least compared to your level of calcium, is that your body will default to contracted muscles, whether skeletal, cardiac or smooth muscle, which means that any of the following symptoms of magnesium deficiency may become apparent:
- tension headaches
- migraine or cluster headaches
- tendency to muscle cramps and clenching
- narrowing of blood vessels due to the contraction of the smooth muscle in the walls of the blood vessels
- insomnia due to tense muscles
- twitching, i.e. of eyelid or extremities
- constipation
There is an observable relationship among some of these symptoms. For example, migraineurs are very often constipated as a rule. Is it that the constipation leads to retention of toxins, which lead to migraine? Or is it that both constipation and migraines are resulting from magnesium deficiency?
Further complicating the matter is how exactly migraines function, that is the mechanism of migraines. Two main hypotheses exist for how migraine pain occurs. The more recent and popular hypothesis is that there is altered electrical activity in the brain prior to the onset of the migraine, which then leads to less activity of the neurons in a given part of the brain, which then leads to a local acute inflammation that affects the nerve roots.
An older hypothesis is that alteration in the diameter of blood vessels is what triggers migraine. Although this hypothesis is not as popular now, it is consistent with lower magnesium levels in the brain. My research in the early 1990's also supports this older hypothesis.
I surveyed figure skaters, both freestyle skaters who incorporate fast spins into their skating, as well as ice dancers, who maintain a similar level of activity, in the same cold environment of the ice rink, for a similar amount of time, among similarly fit people. In other words, the main difference that I isolated is that the freestylists did practice spins, while the ice dancers did not have any such centrifugal effect on their bodies.
My hypothesis was that freestylists would experience centrifugation of blood away from the central axis of a spin, whereas the ice dancers would not. We already know that centrifugation of fluid elsewhere in the body occurs during skaters' spinning. One example involves the sit spin, also known as the "snot spin" by some because the nose is outside of and pointing away from the axis of rotation. At times, the overactive zoom of TV cameras during high profile ice competitions has displayed this mucus-flinging phenomenon to the cringing public. Another example is that high-performing freestylists can spin so fast that it makes their fingers warm and flushed, we can only presume from a flow of blood toward the extremities.
As it turned out, the freestylists had a higher incidence of migraine, including migraines that began while on the ice. The shorter article that I wrote on the subject for the medical journal Lancet, appears at this link. 22% of freestylists, compared with 4% of ice dancers reported migraines. And 91% of the migraineurs reported a change in migraines while skating, mostly mentioning spinning as having a mostly deleterious effect.
Low thyroid: high incidence in the U.S.
The thyroid gland, one of the most unremarkable features of our anatomy, not even large enough usually to make a bulge at the front of the neck where it resides, is actually quite important to good health and well-being.
People with severe hypothyroidism, the clinical term for low thyroid function, have rather obvious symptoms of constantly feeling cold, fatigue and a tendency to gain weight, with nearly impossible efforts to lose weight. Often such symptoms are striking enough to come to the attention of medical personnel sooner or later, and the patient is dosed for life with synthetic thyroid hormone, which supplements the low output of the under performing thyroid gland.
However, there are other symptoms, potentially much more devastating, that for many people are the result of low thyroid function. Broda Barnes, MD shook up conventional thinking about the thyroid in 1976, when he showed connections between low thyroid and heart disease. He also showed a clear connection from low thyroid to elevated blood fats and blood cholesterol. This is something that is still every bit as true today, but is still largely ignored by the medical community. The ignorance has turned out to be convenient, because cholesterol-lowering medications are so much more expensive and enriching than thyroid hormones for the pharmaceutical companies. Whereas thyroid supplementation may not only resolve the underlying cause of high cholesterol, it would also likely help the patient with mood, energy and weight management.
So low thyroid function is grossly under diagnosed. It may seem odd that so many people have low thyroid function, but if you consider the various environmental threats to the thyroid, it is a wonder that any of us have that gland working at all.
Here are some of the most prevalent threats to the thyroid gland:
- Background radiation: Cell phone towers have proliferated in large and small metropolitan areas. Cordless phones and microwaves are used in most households. Electromagnetic fields bathe our houses and workplaces continuously. All of this radiation damages the thyroid.
- Other radiation: X-rays do more thorough and immediate damage to the thyroid. Always make sure you are given a shield to cover your neck when having dental or any other x-rays.
- Estrogen is everywhere. Car exhaust, plastics, pesticides, even chemicals in our shampoos and other soaps have estrogen-like chemical compounds. These substances interfere with the production of thyroid hormone, and they are everywhere in our industrial-to post-industrial society. Even men in our society are estrogen-dominant.
- Soy deserves special mention as an increasingly common problem for the thyroid. Soy is a plant that has become popular in agriculture because it will grow where other plants can no longer grow. It does this because it is very efficient at pulling minerals out of the soil. Then once the molecules of soy get into you, they pull out your minerals too. The thyroid, being an especially mineral dependent gland, is especially weakened by soy. Soy is therefore known as a goitrogen, and should be avoided, except as a condiment
- Selenium is a common mineral in rich natural topsoils, but has become depleted over the years in our soils because of monoculture, lack of composting and other unhealthy farming practices. Selenium is crucial to the thyroid hormone conversion that must take place in order for us to benefit from our thyroid output. See you naturopathic physician for help in supplementing good amounts of this and other nutrients.
Treatment options for low thyroid
Fortunately, the low thyroid patient has many options, perhaps more than for almost any other condition, especially if the hypothyroidism is mild. As a Naturopathic Medical Doctor and primary care physician, I like to take the gentlest measures first. For example, after I order several different tests in a "panel" of thyroid tests, I can determine if nutritional deficiencies are relevant to the patient's condition. Then I supplement a number of nutrients to enhance thyroid function. However, those same tests may tell me that more than a little intervention is needed. Still there are amino acids and/or herbs that may be sufficient.
If more intervention is needed there are a number of glandular options available; usually thyroid gland derived from sheep and then encapsulated as a supplement to the thyroid. Even this much of an intervention may still be therapeutic and repairing to one's own thyroid, as are all of the above-mentioned treatments.
Finally, if none of the above-mentioned treatments are sufficient or appropriate to the patient's needs, there are pharmaceutical options among the synthetic thyroid hormones.
In any case, it is a story with a quick and happy ending for most patients, because the hypothyroid symptoms can often soon be eliminated by appropriate treatment.
A first step would be to consult your local naturopathic physician. The largest directory of naturopathic doctors is www.naturopathic.org.
Herb of the month: Coleus forskohlii
Coleus forskohlii is a useful herb for a number of applications. It may be most useful in that it increases intracellular amounts of cyclic AMP. This is a naturally occurring compound in the body that allows for a lot of different cellular functions. One of the functions it seems to strengthen is thyroid function.
However, coleus has been shown to be helpful in a number of other uses. One of the most promising is its use with glaucoma, in that it brings down pressure in the eye. Psoriasis has also responded favorably to coleus treatment, possibly because cyclic AMP tends to be low in skin affected by psoriasis.