Botox® for Migraines? How Does That Work?

If you live under the constant threat of migraines, you’re probably tired of this chronic condition overshadowing your life. 

You’re most definitely not alone in this frustration. About 10% of the world’s population has migraines, and women outpace men by about 3 to 1 when it comes to these debilitating headaches.

Imagine if there was a way you could prevent migraines from developing in the first place, and even if they do develop, minimizing the pain and duration during an attack. Well, that’s exactly what people are experiencing with Botox® treatments.

As headache and migraine specialists, the goal of our team here at Pain Medicine Consultants is to find ways to put head pain in the backseat so you can live your life. While there’s no cure for chronic migraines, there are some effective management and preventive solutions, such as Botox treatments. Here’s how they work.

Botox — a multi-faceted tool

Botox is widely known as an antiaging tool, but what you might not realize is that Botox played a role in the medical field long before combating wrinkles. Botulinum toxin type A — the key ingredient in Botox — was first used in the 1970s to address strabismus (cross eyes). 

As researchers continued to explore the uses of the neurotoxin, they found it could help with hyperhidrosis (severe underarm sweating), cervical dystonia, incontinence, and, yes, wrinkles.

Along the way, researchers and medical providers found that Botox was also minimizing migraine headaches in chronic sufferers, and after many trials, the Food and Drug Administration approved Botox for chronic migraines in 2010.

How Botox can provide relief for chronic migraines

If you have chronic migraines, it means that you have 15 headache days per month. This doesn’t necessarily mean 15 separate migraine attacks, as migraines can last up to three days. No matter how it breaks out, the point is that you’re spending half your time with head pain, which is an unacceptable way to live.

As researchers work toward better understanding this neurological condition and finding a cure, the best approaches at this point for migraines are preventive and management treatments.

Botox works by disrupting the pain signaling at the juncture of your nerves and muscles. When we inject Botox around your head, face, and neck, the muscles absorb the neurotoxin and pass it along to the peripheral nerves in the area where it disrupts neurotransmission of pain.

As a result, Botox has been found to prevent, on average, 8-9 headache days per month, and it can also minimize the pain when an attack does occur.

One analysis of the use of Botox in migraine sufferers found that the treatment reduced the number of migraine attacks per month, as well as “pain intensity, medication use, emergency visits, and migraine-related disabilities.”  

Even a small reduction in any of these areas can significantly improve your quality of life.

Starting your Botox treatments

To get started treating your migraines with Botox, we begin with two treatments that we space apart by 12 weeks. After that, you return for a quick round of Botox injections every 12 weeks — so, only four treatments per year.

You should see results fairly quickly after your first round of injections, and as you continue the treatments, you should notice fewer days being hijacked by migraine attacks.

If you’d like to see for yourself why 99% of current Botox users plan to continue the treatment, simply contact us at one of our offices in Pleasant Hill, Corte Madera, or Pleasanton, California, to schedule an appointment.