Can Medicinal Herbs Be a Solution for Migraine?
Physicians are still doing researches for finding new treatment methods for migraine, the causes of which are still not clear. Neurologist Emel Gokmen is one of the few physicians in Turkey who applies an unorthodox method. So we have talked with her about this method called “neural therapy” which gives positive results on several migraineurs.
Why are migraine and headache more common among women than men?
There is only one reason for that: fertility. Female body tries to get itself pregnant each month for a major part of its life with the help of a hormonal cycle. This, cause a major change in hormones and it is a trigger for migraine. More importantly, intrauterine devices and abortions are major traumas for the uterus. The uterus, which creates a baby, has an intense neural stimulus and this makes it easier to form defects as a result of these traumas and cause migraine. Also, unnecessary C-sections are to be avoided but unfortunately they are very common in Turkey. Long story short, all these triggers make migraine more common in women.
You apply neural therapy for migraine. Could you describe the procedure to us?
Neural therapy does not try to decrease the frequency of migraine attacks as conventional drug therapies. It directly targets the causes and fixes all the problems I have mentioned above. This therapy begins by taking the patient’s history and then the neural stimulus of the area, related to an operation or disease before migraine, gets fixed. Thereby, the cause of migraine disappears. This is not a drug therapy. Injections have procaine and procaine, provides a bioelectrical improvement in the problematic area by reacting stimulations. This effect of procaine, obtained from urtica urens and bitter almonds, discovered by chance in the 1920s by two German physicians. Unfortunately, this method, being widely used in west, is not known in Turkey.
What is the success rate of neural therapy? Does it have any side effects?
A complete success is to be expected. Migraine can be cured with neural therapy and the efficiency of this treatment does not depend on the severity, frequency and the duration of the pain because migraine is an autonomic nervous system disorder and neural therapy reorganizes this system. Also, this therapy does not have any side effects, it is natural. In fact, it helps other diseases that are causing migraine as well. Children do not get tonsillitis as often as before, women get their hormonal balance back and the swelling, aggression and pain they experience during their period is gone with the menstrual irregularity.
Neural therapy procedure
This therapy is applied in sessions and it ends when the problems causing migraine are fixed completely. Usually 6-10 sessions are enough and with 2 sessions a week. This covers 4-6 weeks. Once the treatment is complete, there is no need for repeating it again because the causes are already fixed. Thus the patient may go hungry, drink wine and be sleepless. Because he or she does not have to avoid these triggers anymore.
VATAN NEWSPAPER – BENISSIMO, DECEMBER 2007