suppressed with drugs. Physicians generally don't hesitate to prescribe
medication for a person to take for the rest of his or her life. The common
medical practice of giving drugs (which are all toxic) to treat the ill effects of
retained toxins, without attempting to determine and remove causative factors,
is a misguided approach illustrative of the overall inadequacy of today's health
care system. Fortunately, I can take my patients off these drugs when they
learn how to adopt healthful diets and life-style practices that are much more
effective at preventing such attacks.
During the first pharmacology lecture I attended in medical school, the
instructor admonished us never to forget that all drugs are toxic. Indeed, many
of their effects on the body are obtained because these substances are toxins
that interfere with or poison the body's natural activity. Besides contributing to
the body's toxic overload and leading to overall deterioration in health, it is well
recognized that the medications used to treat migraines are a crucially
important factor in perpetuating future attacks. Drugs that are used for
headaches—such as acetaminophen (Tylenol), barbiturates, codeine, and
ergotamine—all cause headaches to recur on a rebound basis as these toxins
begin to wash out of the nervous system. Then, in order to temporarily lessen
the pain, headache sufferers take more of these tissue poisons, only to excite
another attack in the near future, thus maintaining the patient on a drugging
merry-go-round.
The use of medication, even in quantities as low as ten aspirin tablets per
week, can be the cause of a chronic daily headache syndrome.
The best thing a physician caring for headache patients can do is withdraw their medication.
One medical study found that stopping all treatments and pain medication
actually decreased headache frequency and intensity in the subjects by more
than 50 percent.
Besides the typical toxic drugs that physicians routinely prescribe, toxins
such as alcohol, lead, arsenic, morphine, carbon monoxide, pesticides, and
noxious fumes can cause severe headaches.
Likewise, other unhealthy practices—drinking coffee and soft drinks, eating
sweets and other nutritionless foods—contribute to the problem. Even drinking
milk can add to our discomfort, as it frequently contains multiple antibiotics
given to the cow.
Most individuals in our modern society are dealing with the ingestion of drugs
and other chemical toxins almost daily and are continually, and sometimes
painfully, attempting to detoxify. Taking further poisons into the system to
prevent the painful elimination of wastes merely perpetuates the problem and
allows headaches to recur more frequently.
Just as we can ―cure‖ the coffee drinker's headache by giving him or her more
coffee to stop the withdrawal or elimination of the retained toxins associated
with caffeine consumption, so, too, can we ―cure‖ the heroin addict's withdrawal
symptoms by giving him or her more heroin or by substituting methadone. We
can ―cure‖ the headache or migraine sufferer's problems by giving him
narcotics, or by prescribing Esgic, Ergostat, Bellergal, Cafergot, Excedrin,
Fiorinal, Vanquish, or Wigaine, which contain either caffeine, ergotamine, or
barbiturates.
These approaches, although widely employed and accepted, do not remove
the cause and, in fact, perpetuate the problem they attempt to solve.
Prescribing such medications merely temporarily curtails symptoms of
withdrawal, not much different from the pusher on the street corner, selling his
wares to the addicts who must suffer pain should they not continue to take their
narcotics. Headache patients should never be given opiates, barbiturates, or
caffeine (which are found in many headache remedies) as these substances will
always make the problem worse in the long run.
Many other medications also cause headaches, both the garden variety
tension headache as well as migraines. These drugs include those used for
angina and high blood pressure, as well as estrogen-containing birth control
pills and estrogen hormone replacement therapy, often prescribed after
menopause.
When migraine and tension headache patients are placed on low-protein,
natural plant-based diets, with no refined sweets of any type, they almost all
recover within a month, never needing medication or further treatments to
control their condition.
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