Combating Medication Overuse Headaches

Medication overuse headache (MOH) is a very common manifestation of chronic headache patients. It is one of the unique instances where a once effective way of controlling an illness will actually perpetuate the illness further as the body adapts to a chemical intervention. This condition is unique to patients with chronic daily headache disorders and various chronic pain syndromes like fibromyalgia.

The most frustrating part about MOH is that you may do better for a long period of time because of a medication, but as the effectiveness of the medication wanes over time you may actually experience the headache worse than before.

It’s a situation that can cause despair as medications are generally the treatment of choice for all headache conditions. If your body has become resistant to all of the available medications, what can you do next?

Why Is Your Medicine Making Your Head Hurt?

People with chronic headaches will generally have 7-10  headache days per month. For better or for worse, there are a wide variety of medications that can help knock a headache out or prevent them from occurring. It’s not unusual for a chronic headache patient to have  a cocktail of drugs that they have to take on a daily basis.

The problem with a frequent medication regiment in chronic pain conditions is that the cells of your body almost always have an adaptation to to make itself more resistant to the medications’ effects. This can happen even if you’re taking your medications correctly as prescribed by your doctor.

The headache that results from MOH is often called a rebound headache. As the effect of the medication wears off, the headache returns rapidly which can create a need for another dose of medication. In this way it becomes a cycle of struggle as the effects of the medication start to decline faster and the rebound headaches become more persistent. When this occurs, the chronic headache patient can become the chronic daily headache as the headaches will begin to occur greater than 15 days per month. Because of the reliance on these medications, medication overuse headache has become the 3rd most common headache disorder, and the most common cause of migraine-like symptoms.

Research has shown that this can occur regardless of the type of medication you take. It’smost frequently associated with prescription migraine medications, but it has been documented to occur in people taking over-the-counter drugs like ibuprofen. Hard pain meds like oxycontin may be used by headache patients without a doctor’s prescription, and these can tend to accelerate the process to MOH because of the way that opiods sensitize your brain.

You can read more about how pain pills can make your pain worse in this article I wrote last year:

Research: Can Pain Pills Cause More Pain Over Time?

How to Beat Medication Overuse Headaches

The easy answer is to stop taking your medications for a while because….

If you don’t understand this meme, then ask someone who is younger than 30. I promise it’s funny.

Unfortunately, biology isn’t that simple, especially if you have chronic pain.  Are there side effects to stopping a daily medication? Will you experience worse pain when you stop taking the drugs? How will you cope with the pain if you can’t take any meds? How long will this take before you can make the meds work again?

Chronic headache patients need effective non-pharmacological methods to deal with the pain of headache physiology.

One specific target for drug-less treatment of headaches is by correcting dysfunctions in the neck.

In many cases, headaches syndromes can be a result of a secondary effect of a shift in at the top of the neck. This is why chronic headache patients are some of my favorite people to see in practice because a gentle correction of the neck  has allowed us to have a very high success rate with chronic headache syndromes.

While addressing the cervical spine may not address the cause of  a medication overuse headache, it may help fix the primary source of a patient’s headache condition so that taking the medication becomes less necessary. The most common comment I get from headache patients is when they tell me that they’re taking less ibuprofen since they started getting their neck better.

A shift in the atlas can disrupt fluid in the spine and cause neuroinflammation in the brain. In some cases, this may be tied to MS.

Within 2 weeks of neck corrections with the NUCCA procedure, the vast majority of our headache patients experience relief in either the frequency or intensity of their daily headaches.

Not All Neck Adjustments Involve Cracking

A lot of people are scared about having their neck worked on by a chiropractor. The general portrayal of a neck adjustment by viral Youtube videos can make it seem scary.

While chiropractic adjustments have a tremendous track record for safety, the bottom line is that a lot of people just don’t want their neck cracked because the sound and the motion make them really uneasy. This leads to patients tightening up their neck and bracing which can make a neck manipulation hurt in the hands of a chiropractor that is not skilled.

That’s one of the big reasons why I’ve used the NUCCA procedure throughout my career. The NUCCA procedure involves a very light pressure to correct the neck as opposed to a high velocity manipulation. By using the NUCCA procedure, the doctor is able to measure and control how much force goes into the neck, and if we have corrected the underlying dysfunction. All of this happens without the popping, twisting, or cracking of the spine.

Not all patients with headaches are good candidates for the NUCCA procedure. Only patients with a subtle shift in the top vertebra called the Atlas will benefit from the NUCCA correction. A thorough history and examination will help us determine if the Atlas is causing a problem and if it’s something that can be fixed.