Chiropractic Solutions for Trigeminal Induced Headaches

Discover how chiropractic care can alleviate trigeminal-induced headaches! Tune into our podcast 'Ask the Chiropractor' for expert insights. #healthy815 #palmerproud #icachiropractic

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Transcript

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Hello, Dr. Brant Hulsebus here, and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask the Chiropractor is my little podcast that I do when someone has a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I try to answer. I'm a chiropractor here in Rockford, Illinois. I'm a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic, and I'm happy to be the team chiropractor of the Rockford Icehogs. Let's dive into it. Hello and welcome to another episode of Ask the Chiropractor. Thanks for tuning in. Today I want to talk about headaches. And I want to talk about a really specific kind of headache. Trigeminal nerve issues. I took a weekend many years ago in St. Louis with a professor of mine named Dr. Dan Murphy. Dr. Murphy is one of the best chiropractic professors in my opinion out there. And he talked about headaches, where headaches come from, and also all the headaches. And the majority of every headache has a common factor. It's called the trigeminal cervical nucleus. Whenever you have a headache, almost any type of headache, the trigeminal cervical nucleus is very important. When people talk about trigeminal issues or headaches, we often see a common thing here in chiropractic, where we can step in sometimes and influence the outcome of these. The trigeminal cervical nucleus is part of your brain area, and I want to talk a little bit about what goes in and what goes out and how chiropractic then plays a role, and why you might be having these headaches because of trigeminal issues. identify those. So if you give me a minute here, let's break it down exactly what happens. You see the sensory input going to trigeminal cervical nucleus is very important to us. Some of the areas that goes in is the cervical trigeminal nucleus, right? So it's going to come from the cervical spine and the trigeminal nerve. Let's talk about the cervical spine first before we get the trigeminal. Majority of the innervation of the cervical trigeminal nucleus comes from your C1, C2, and C3. Now if you watch any of my other podcasts where I talk about chiropractic and headaches, I always talk about C1 and C2. We have found over the years, a lot of times by giving an upper cervical adjustment, we've had people come into the clinic with a really bad migraine. You can always see them. Either I go in the room, they turn all the lights off, they don't want any noise, or they've got sunglasses on when I come in the room. We lay them on their back and I adjust their upper neck and they get up and they feel relief within minutes. They said, thank goodness you're open. I'm glad you're here. I'm glad it's not a weekend when you're not open. So happy to come in and see you, get my headache gone. So this is typically a cervical trigeminal nucleus with a cervical origin. Your upper two bones in your neck are misaligned causing what we call subluxation. We adjust that subluxation. Boom, you're feeling better. Now there's also another part of this nerve called the trigeminal. Now the trigeminal has got two functions. It's a cranial nerve. A cranial nerve is going to be a sensory nerve or a motor nerve. Sensory meaning that they feel. They're going to feel the cold, they're going to feel the warmth, they're going to feel pressure. And they're going to go back to the brain and tell the brain what's going on. Moral part of this would be they have an action. So they react to something. And this nerve actually is both. And they call it the trigeminal nerve because it has three main branches. One branch is basically, it's right in front of your ear. And one branch goes up the side of your face, over your eye. And that's called the ophthalmic branch. Another branch basically goes straight across underneath your eye and above your top teeth. And that's the maxillary branch. And lastly, there's a branch that goes right down your jawline called the mandibular branch. And these are going to feel, sense things inside your face. Often when someone comes in and tells me they've had a really bad migraine for a couple days, I'll ask them, have you had a lot of sinus pressure too? And they'll say yes, how did you know that? I'll ask them, Did you have some dental work done recently? And they'll say yes, we did. A couple days ago I had a root canal. A couple days ago I had this or this at the dentist office. Because we find is that when your sinuses are impacted it can affect the maxillary and ophthalmic branch depending on which sinus. When we find that you've had dental work, the nerves, the sensory nerves that go to the top teeth and the bottom teeth can affect the maxillary or the mandibular branch. And this would be a stressful negative stimuli going from that part of the nerve into the cervical trigeminal nucleus. resulting in a migraine headache. So these are some clues that we get a lot. Something's going on. Now, there's a couple more things that go in there. Cranial nerve 7, cranial nerve 9, and cranial nerve 10. Cranial nerve 10 is your vagus nerve. You've heard me talking about the vagus nerve. This is the nerve that tells our body that the danger is gone. It's okay. It's time to relax. The danger is left. It's time to turn off fight and flight. And how do we address the vagus nerve? The C1 C2. You Exactly how I started this conversation, the cervical trigeminal nucleus. So we influence those cranial nerves by adjusting the C1 and C2. If you've had a negative stimulus, either from Dental work, eye problems, sinus problems, whatever it might be in your face, or the C1, C2, or C3, that's what we would look for you. Now, what are some other clues? Let's talk about where the nerves come from the cervical and trigeminal nucleus and out. There's different pathways they can take. One way is real easy, the motor functions. The motor functions of this can affect, the output goes to the motor function of the trigeminal nerve. Now, which muscles are these? These are your TMJ muscles. If you've got a misalignment of C1 and C2, we can influence a cervical trigeminal nucleus causing TMJ issues. If people have TMJ issues, we look at the C1 and C2, how we can influence the motor nerves coming out, going to the TMJ muscles. By adjusting the C one and C two, we can influence the cervical trigeminal nucleus, which will result in them removing the stress to the tri, to the TMJ muscles and hopefully relax the jaw. Also, if you ever look at, like we were in school, we had a camera and we could see the first cervical in the TMJ joint. So if the first cervical is misaligned, it actually physically gets in the way of the TMJ joint. They're really close to each other. Matter of fact. When we learn the adjustment to toggle recoil, number one thing they look for us is to make sure that we're actually on the C1 and not the TMJ because that's how close they are. So TMJ problems could suggest cervical trigeminal nucleus problems. Another one is that it opens and closes the diameter of your station tube in your ears. So if you told me I've had headaches and TMJ problems or I've had headaches and my ear is bothering me, I'm thinking cervical trigeminal nucleus. Alright when we open and close the abdomen of the tube, the tinnitus can improve, the tinnitus can clear up and go away. If the tube's been narrowed and there's pressure on the eardrum, we can get rid of some earaches and ear problems. If that's the case, again, we don't treat the earache, we don't treat the Eustachian tube, we adjust C1, C2, knowing the nerves from there, go to the trigeminal cervical nucleus, and the trigeminal cervical nucleus operates. output goes directly to the muscles that open and close diameter of your ear can cause ear infections, tinnitus, and other problems. Next, we also know the nerves in the cervical trigeminal nucleus go up to your thalamus. From your thalamus, they go to your cortex. And the cortex is where we perceive pain. So that is the main reason for we have headaches. It can also go to the hypothalamus. The cervical trigeminal nucleus goes right to the hypothalamus. And the hypothalamus directly affects the PAG system, the paraepidoxygray. And that alone, also, there's theories out there that when the PAG system's upset, migraine headaches and headaches can come from that as well. It also can go to the pituitary gland. So if you upset the pituitary gland, I've always said that if you upset one part of the endocrinology system, the whole endocrinology system goes AWOL because each one's a check and balance to a different gland. The, the pituitary gland, the it's going to influence this thyroid is going to influence this, it's going to influence that, turn this and this off. So once one of your hormones goes offline the whole system gets a little kinks in it and has problems. So there's been hormonal issues also. And we go back to thinking about the cervical trigeminal nucleus. And also, lastly, can also regulate the stress response, your fight and flight response. Now remember, as chiropractors, I talk all about the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system just basically runs your bodily functions. Nice and calm. But if you're in a state of stress or you have to respond to a danger, our body goes into a catabolic mode, which would include many changes because, genetically speaking, we are hunters and gatherers. So the only stress genetically we should be having is a big animal trying to eat us. And some of the things that changes, your white blood cell count goes down, you get vasoconstriction in your core of your body, vasodilation in your arms and legs, so you can run you can fight or flight. Cholesterol goes way up. Why does cholesterol go up when you're under stress? Because if the bear scratches you, you don't want to bleed out. You want to survive. Digestion gets all turned upside down because It doesn't matter if you digest your lunch if you're being chased by a bear. So we don't want to waste energy with digestion. White blood cells go down because nobody cares about making white blood cells where you're trying to survive an attack. Because you see a bear attacks over in, five minutes one way or the other. Either you got away or somebody else didn't get away. It's over in five minutes, then you go back and do what we call, out of fight and flight, but otherwise back into parasympathetics. And so if you find yourself like in a state of stress, like you just can't relax, you can't unwind, you can't focus, you can't, you just, you're jittery, jumpy you might sleep, but you wake up every day tired. Then we look at this, are you in a state of fight and flight constantly? And there's two things we do for that. One is, yeah, we adjust to C1 and C2. Now, why do we do that? If we can, tell the hypothalamus there's no real danger, then the hypothalamus will stop the stress response. But what did I say earlier? The vagus nerve is a part of this too. So your vagus nerve turns off your fight and flight response everywhere, belly button up. So if we're adjusting your C1 and C2, we're waking up that vagus nerve, telling that vagus nerve to go back to work. And that works directly with this. Some of these systems crisscross with this whole thing with the headaches, back to the C1 and C2. Let me summarize for all this. If you've recently had dental work, sinus problems, headaches, TMJ issues, or ear problems, and you're having some really bad migraine headaches, there's a really good chance your trigeminal cervical nucleus is involved. If your trigeminal cervical nucleus is involved, chiropractors can definitely make a change by adjusting your C1, C2, or C3. Now how do we know when to do this? We take an x ray of you. We look at your x ray, we see the misalignment. Then we go over and we do what we call motion palpation. We feel those bones, we see if they're moving or not. We feel if they're locked or fixated. We might do a range of motion test and a couple other things, but then we can find them. Okay. So if we find those three bones are misaligned, and you're having this issue, then the chiropractor should be able to help you. Now, if I went to a chiropractor, what would I expect? If I'm dealing with this, I would expect to have my x rays taken. You'd have to have your x rays taken. I'd have to have my C3 adjusted. There's lots of different ways to adjust these bones. I learned all kinds of ways when I was at Palmer College. I learned how to do it when you're sitting in a chair, when you're laying on your stomach, when you're laying on your back, when you're, laying on your side with toggle recoil adjustment. There's just so many different ways of doing these. So I won't tell you which way. Their chiropractor's job is to know the best way to give you the best adjustment for these areas. I have a new patient right now. She's undergoing a lot of stress to her central nervous system. So we're going the tortoise way instead of the hare way. We're taking our time working into it, but she's had a lot of these issues and a lot of these problems. So we're hoping to make a big change for her. So there you have it trigeminal cervical nucleus headaches, trigeminal headaches hand in hand, we see it all the time. As a matter of fact, in my adjusting rooms I have a giant flow chart of everything I just described. So if patients come to me and they tell me they went to the dentist, I can show them how it affects the parts of the brain and we have little bubbles and arrows going back and forth to show you what's going on. This is a big issue in chiropractic. Not a lot of chiropractors even really fully grasp the whole thing of it. We just all look at C1, C2 and the rest will take care of itself. But I wanted to break down a little bit more of the science for you all today. Okay, so there you have it. If you have TMJ issues, dental work, just done sinus problems, eye issues, and you're having really bad headaches maybe you've been told you've had some trigeminal stuff in the past and you've worked with nerve blockers or something like that it is worth a trip to your chiropractor to have 'em Take a look at those bones to C one, C two and C3. See if they can help you. So there you have it. If you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, remember there's only one qualified person to answer and that would be a chiropractor. And if you'd like me to answer your question, go ahead and leave a comment wherever you're listening to this, wherever you're watching this, wherever you're reading this. And I'll see those comments. And maybe next week you'll be the question of the week. Thanks everybody.