Seattle Children’s Hospital doctor’s new migraine trick: Will them away

Life is stressful. Because of that fact, you may get a headache. And if you’re really unlucky you get a migraine. Then what do you do? Probably curl up in a ball in a dark room until it passes.

But what if you could will your migraine away? That’s the idea behind new research at Seattle Children’s Hospital.

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Tyler Stewart was just 5 years old when he got his first migraine.

“I just remember standing up and going to get a drink of water and the pain hitting all of a sudden,” Tyler said.

A month later he got another migraine. The agony became chronic after that: We’re talking migraines three, five and sometimes even seven days a week.

“Unbearable”, Tyler says of the pain. “Definitely unbearable. Where you wouldn’t want to turn your head at all, you won’t want to move, you would just want to lay down. You didn’t really want to do anything besides curl up in a ball in your bed.”

His chronic migraines lasted 10 years. His mom, Kelly Stewart, was by his side through it all as she tried to find answers.

“We’ve done everything from food logs to activity logs, to just seeing if it’s a time of day or what causes it or what triggers it,” Stewart said. “If it’s smells, if it’s, you know, something in the outdoors.”

Migraines are still largely a mystery to doctors. Dr. Emily Law at the Seattle Children’s Hospital Pain Clinic says there are myriad reasons for migraines, but no definitive answer.

Adults can verbalize these symptoms easily, but it’s harder to tell when they strike in children. Law says one indicator for parents is if a child wants to go into a dark room and sleep when they have a headache, “because that can reflect an additional component going on just beyond your everyday headache.”

Law, a psychologist by trade, tried something innovative to solve the mystery of childhood chronic migraines: Behavioral therapy &#8212 not pills &#8212 to treat migraines.

“When your pain system is working well, your body will experience pain as a way to indicate something dangerous is happening,” Law said. “Children with chronic pain conditions experience pain after their body is completely healed. And the issue then becomes that their pain system is not working properly and it’s sending pain signals that may or may not indicate something is happening to the body.”

Basically, the brain is misfiring pain signals. So Dr. Law applied cognitive behavioral therapy and biofeedback to chronic migraine sufferers. Tyler, 10 years after his first migraine, was one of those therapy recipients.

“If you had paid one day with a migraine and you went home and curled up in a ball in your bed and just laid there for about six hours and you just did that every time you had a migraine, you’re training your body to do that and your pain will just get worse. That’s your brain getting in a habit,” Tyler explained. “So if you train your body to get into a different habit &#8212 saying ‘oh, hey, migraines aren’t that bad.’ You can go out to school. You can go for a walk. You can go play sports. You can do anything. Your brain will start to build up a wall for migraines.”

Tyler wouldn’t have believed this mind-bending trick would work had he not experienced it himself. He also takes a daily medication, but didn’t see actual results until he learned cognitive behavioral therapy and biofeedback.

Tyler’s migraines dipped from three to five each week to maybe one every three weeks. The biofeedback was even more life-changing than the behavioral therapy. Tyler described it as creating an image inside his head &#8212 maybe a past memory or something that can calm stress levels &#8212 which warms up the body and can lower his heart rate.

“It’s the coolest thing ever by just making an image in your head,” Tyler said.

Following Tyler’s success, Dr. Law is going to take a recent $140,000 grant she received to continue her work on behavioral interventions at Seattle Children’s. Her goal is to develop a web-based screening tool for families of kids who might suffer from chronic migraines.

While Law’s focus is children, she thinks this type of therapy can be useful to adults with migraines, too. Tyler’s mom agrees.

“He sat there with me and did biofeedback showing me how to help myself when I had one, and it was crazy incredible,” she said. “And I thought, ‘Everybody should know how to do this,’ not just for migraines but for life when you’re stressed out.”