Occipital Neuralgia
Hello and welcome to the Extraordinary Health Podcast. My name is Dr. Paul Beckham and today we're going to be going over occipital neuralgia. What is occipital neuralgia? Occipital neuralgia is just a fancy term for the nerves that are on the backside of your head that go from the base of it up into your neck and travel up over your head and when they get irritated.
they're gonna cause basically a muscle tension headache. And the big thing that we always have to look at in our office is to make sure that we're finding out exactly what might be causing the occipital neuralgia. Is it the nerves themselves that are just causing the problem? There's something wrong there. Could even be nutrients that you need in your body. Or it could be that, hey, there's some scar tissue in the area from a previous injury or something like that.
People that have had whiplash injuries from car accidents can get those nerves irritated. The other thing that can happen is that the muscles up in that portion of your neck can get super tight and they can cause even myofascial trigger points that'll radiate up over your head. So we're trying to determine during your exam, is this something coming from the nerves or is it coming from the muscles? Or the other thing is, is it coming from the bones and joints up in that portion of your neck?
which would include your occiput, that's where you get occipital neuralgia from, the nerves are coming out from there, as well as the first and second cervical vertebra are usually what are involved. Occasionally we can even get the TMJ effect in the area as well. If that gets tight kinda on the front side, it'll cause those muscles in the backside to get tight. But hey, this is something that is very treatable and we get excellent results with it because we get down to what's causing
the root cause of the problem here, rather than, you know, in a traditional medical sense where they're just going to give you a medication to cover up the symptoms. And then you end up having the same thing happening again. So let's stop that cycle of using pain medications, just to cover up the symptoms. Let's find out what the root cause of the problem is and get it resolved for you so that you can live life headache free. I mean, if you're suffering from, you know,
occipital neuralgia or occipital neuralgia with headaches, you know, give us a call at 701-356-0016 or go out to our website at allseasonsintegrative.com and you can click on the schedule now button and schedule your appointment so we can get you evaluated and get you checked out to see what we can do for you to get down to that root cause so that you can live headache free and stop chasing those symptoms.
because even long term, you've seen all the medication advertisements on TV. What do these medications even cause? I mean, worst case scenario, death, right? But a lot of them, especially when you're getting into the non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, things like ibuprofen, aspirin, Tylenol, maybe not so much, but you can actually cause problems with your gastrointestinal tract. So all of a sudden,
you can have a ton of other issues going on and you're basically, you can get rebound headaches even from these medications. So here the problem is the medication's not even taking so let's try and stop this and at the end I'm gonna give you some different things here that you can even do diet nutrition wise to possibly even help out in the meantime here. So if you have occipital neuralgia, hey, it is a treatable condition and we can get.
results because we get to the root cause of the problem so that you can live life headache free. And here's some tips. You know, dietary tips with occipital neuralgia. There's, you know, there might be a few different things going on here. I would say people could probably look at eating things a little bit more on the organic end of the spectrum. You know, some organic beef, especially some of the wild caught salmon and all that. They're gonna have lots of those good essential fatty acids.
that can help protect those nerves and keep them healthy. But once we get into some diet nutrition things, the big thing would be to just make sure you have a really good high potency multivitamin or mineral that you're taking. Some of the things to pay attention to there are also to make sure that it has enough B6. That is a huge help to help get these headaches to go away. You wanna get somewhere in between 75 and 100 milligrams of that per day. You probably wanna split the doses up.
I usually however tell people to take the B vitamins in the morning because it's gonna act like an energy drink So if you're tired in the morning, this would be something to help you out there Whereas the next one magnesium you want to get about two to six hundred milligrams of that a day Preferably, you know in more like an amino acid bonded form you know literally like magnesium malate magnesium threonate glycinate Because those are gonna be super helpful
for you sleeping at night. So I would say maybe take one magnesium in the morning, that's maybe about 200 milligrams, and take two of them at night, just to help you sleep a little bit better at night. Now the big thing is, although we should probably get it checked first, is vitamin D levels. Let's make sure that your vitamin D levels are at an appropriate level here, so that long term, if that happens to be the issue, and you can start taking some vitamin D, I usually tell people to shoot for about 5,000 IUs a day, but again, we need to check your levels first before you.
really start getting going on any kind of vitamin D levels there. Just like I talked about before, those fish oils, you know, if you're going to take it in a supplement form, which one to be able to get in is literally one to three grams of what is called EPA and DHA. Those are the smallest essential fatty acids that you can get that are used things for things like your nerves with occipital neuralgia here. There's also use for a lot of other things in your body. So you need to get enough into your body can just repair itself. You never want to be short on any of that.
because long term, you're just going to have more and more neurological things kind of going on in your life. Oh, the big thing is just, you know, make sure you get plenty of protein in cause that can be helpful here. This might be not going to help so much with occipital neurology here, but everybody needs to get plenty of protein in. Another thing is just look at getting in some kind of antioxidants, you know, plant based antioxidant could be grapeseed extract, could be pine bark extract or any other flavonoid rich,
Foods some of them could be you know, I always tell people to eat the rainbow and I'm not talking about skittles I'm talking about Eating eating the rainbow with vegetables and fruits in your diet So one of the highest ones that will give you the biggest boost there as far as orac which is a Oxygen rich antioxidant. I can't remember the darn thing for a But literally it's going to help
pull some of the extra oxygen. So like when your body's starting to rust, you know, so these foods like prunes is the biggest one there. On the vegetable side is kale. So eating some of those in your diet could be super helpful here in helping your body just get rid of any inflammation that's kind of going on or that rust that just constantly wears down on a person's body. So I hope those tips helped and you know, please listen in next week here. I'm gonna continue with these here.
Hopefully with a little bit more of a functional medicine slant and things that you can be doing for yourself at home so that you can Finally feel good and live your full potential This is dr. Paul Beckham with the extraordinary health podcast. Talk to you next week.
