DAKOTA DUNES, SD (KTIV) – More people are treating chronic migraines with botox.
“I was surprised at how well it helped, especially right after the first one,” KTIV’s Katie Copple for the weekend suffers from chronic migraines, which run in her family.
Copple explained: “I tried a lot of different drugs, different treatments, nothing really worked to get rid of the migraine symptoms. And it’s more than just a headache.”
She is doing her second round of botox treatment with CNOS.
“It relaxes the muscles in the head and neck where we inject it. And so with migraine, we think these muscles are just constantly firing and contracting and causing all these debilitating symptoms. And when we use Botox, it actually releases that muscle that relaxes it and provides that improvement,” said Allison Owings with CNOS.
What causes chronic migraines can be different for each person.
“People have caffeine triggers. For me, my biggest thing is the weather. So whenever a storm system moves in, I can usually feel it coming a day or so in advance. I usually feel it during it. And in those stretches, I can have migraine symptoms for three, four, maybe five days,” Copple added.
She has seen improvements since the first treatment.
“It kind of starts around my forehead area, around my hairline, behind my ears and then down my shoulders. With Botox and it’s the same thing, I think you’re getting aesthetics,” Copple said.
The biggest hurdle is often insurance,
“We were fighting more on the insurance side of things to get the referral to come here and then wait to get in because referrals take a while. It was just a lot of waiting,” Copple explained.
“The great thing about Botox is that there are very few side effects because we’re injecting it so locally in those muscles, but there’s very little chance of spread that you know like you see on TV that we’ve never seen happen and it’s just so well tolerated,” he added. Owings.
Talk to your family doctor if you are concerned about the severity of your headaches, preventing you from doing things
“Go in and see a neurologist, there are so many good headache treatments these days. Botox is one of them, but there are so many other great drugs that we use, it doesn’t make sense to suffer with these daily migraines or frequent migraines because there are so many developments,” Owings said.
Copple is having three rounds of Botox and again in 12 weeks and will review if this is the right Copple treatment plan.
“They took the first set and looking back it looks like she had quite a dramatic improvement with the botox. “Having already gone a few days without headaches, the intensity of her headaches has already improved quite significantly,” Owings said.
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It may take four weeks or more after treatment before a reduction in the frequency of migraines is seen, and more than one set of injections may be needed.
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