The Headache Healer’s Handbook. Jan Mundo

       Endnotes

       Index

       About the Author

       Foreword

      Headaches afflict close to half of the U.S. population, with 40 million suffering from migraines, which can be very disabling. Many books have been written for the general public, including two of my own, but Jan Mundo’s Headache Healer’s Handbook brings a unique perspective to this problem.

      When I treat patients in the office, they are usually reassured by the fact that I am also a migraine sufferer, and so it is with Jan’s book — she knows firsthand what it feels like to have a migraine. More importantly, she has discovered ways to relieve her own attacks and those of countless other migraineurs.

      Like Jan, I am a big proponent of nondrug treatments, and this is what she details in her book. I also like her hands-on approach, both literally and figuratively. Psychologists have proven that active treatments, where people are doing things to improve their condition, are much more effective than passive treatments, such as massage, chiropractic, and acupuncture, where things are done to them. This leads to the transfer from an external locus of control to an internal locus of control or, in other words, a shift from being a passive and helpless victim of external circumstances to being an active participant in the events with a significant degree of control.

      Jan begins with the basics — identifying your type of headache and finding possible triggers that make your headaches worse. She recommends at least one visit to the doctor to confirm the diagnosis. This is important not because a brain tumor or an aneurysm is likely to be found (since those are very rare), but because a routine blood test could detect a magnesium or thyroid deficiency, anemia, or another medical problem that could be contributing to headaches.

      Once your diagnosis is confirmed, with Jan’s help you can take an inventory of your diet, sleeping habits, physical environment, and posture to try to find triggers, which can be corrected. Then Jan recommends breathing exercises, which to me have echoes of the Feldenkrais Method; becoming aware of how you breathe can improve not only your breathing itself but also the movements of your chest, your spine, and the rest of your body.

      In chapter 12, “Being Still: Mindfulness and Headaches,” Jan describes another powerful tool in combating headaches as well as many other physical and mental ailments. Yes, everyone is talking about the proven benefits of meditation, but it is surprising how few people actually practice it.

      Chapter 13, “Posture, Ergonomics, and Sleep,” is followed by a chapter on physical exercise, which is proven not only to be good for you but to specifically reduce the frequency and the severity of headaches.

      A large portion of the book is devoted to the Mundo Method, Jan’s unique hands-on therapy, which she developed to treat her own headaches and which has helped many other sufferers she has worked with. The healing power of touch is scientifically proven to dramatically improve outcomes in premature babies, and without a doubt, it can also be harnessed to relieve a variety of headache conditions. Just follow Jan’s advice, and watch your headaches go away.

      — Alexander Mauskop, MD

      Director, New York Headache Center

      Professor of Clinical Neurology, SUNY, Downstate Medical Center

       Preface

      I became a healer by accident — at least, I didn’t plan it.

      In 1970, I intuitively began developing a hands-on method of headache and migraine relief. By placing my hands on someone’s head, including my own, I could feel the headache (or palpate it, in medical terminology), work with its sensations, and stop it cold.

      My clients swear I have magical hands, because I can relieve their headaches and migraines on the spot and halt the horrible symptoms that accompany their pain. I’ve relieved thousands of headaches with my protocol, but my work goes beyond that: I teach people how to heal themselves. I didn’t envision this path, but the process was so compelling that it became my passion and life’s work.

       My Headache Story

      My mom had severe migraines. As a child, I would massage away the knots and “spurs” from her shoulders and upper back. “Right there. Oh, that’s good,” she’d say. But mostly she would retreat to her darkened bedroom, cool washcloth on her forehead, and take a strong pain medication, which barely seemed to help. Until I developed migraines as an adult, I did not fully understand the severity of her pain.

      My journey with headache healing began when I heard that you could relieve a headache by putting your hands on the front and back of the head. I gave it a try and, to my surprise, found I could stop a headache in its tracks. I started to experiment informally on people who had them, including myself, although during that time I didn’t get them often because I was living a more natural lifestyle.

      More accurately, I was living in a whole new world. Four years into my college education at the University of California, Berkeley, I had dropped out to join 250 other idealists following hippie guru Stephen Gaskin. Together we traveled, in a caravan of school buses, to the rolling fields of rural Tennessee, where we founded an intentional spiritual community, a commune really, called The Farm.

      We were like modern-day pioneers. Dedicated to building a better world by “walking our talk,” we bought 1,750 acres of land in the middle of nowhere and built a town, which grew to fifteen hundred residents. We raised, prepared, and preserved our food, eating a soy-based vegan diet with few sweets, no preservatives, and no alcohol. We had home births, assisted by midwives, and in the process we learned to trust the inherent wisdom of our bodies and the power of intention.

      But even though we practiced meditation and followed Eastern as well as Western spiritual principles, collective living had its share of stressors. Thus, although my own headaches were rare back then, I got a lot of practice helping others with theirs.

      In time, however, my situation changed. After leaving the community and returning to Los Angeles in 1985, I began getting frequent, debilitating migraines. Life was stressful. As a thirty-eight-year-old newly divorced mom of three kids who were experiencing big-city life for the first time, I was out on my own, struggling to support my family and starting a career in corporate America.

      Several years later, I began waking up in the middle of the night, soaked in pools of perspiration, and I had hot flashes and mood swings during the day as well. I had no idea what was happening. Fortunately, my baby boomer generation often brought information into the public discourse that had previously been hidden and not discussed. This was especially true of issues involving women’s bodies and hormonal life cycles. And then I learned that migraines often increase during perimenopause in women who are prone to them. Thus I was able to figure out that my strange symptoms indicated I was beginning perimenopause. I was astonished — I was only forty-two years old!

      Seeking solutions to handle all of it — my stress, the perimenopause, and the migraines — I read a multitude of books by physicians, researchers, and wellness experts. These included mind-body books by physicians Herbert Benson, Deepak Chopra, Andrew Weil, and Jon Kabat-Zinn; women’s health books by Christiane Northrup, MD, and Gail Sheehy; positive affirmation books by Shakti Gawain and Louise Hay; and headache books by Oliver Sacks, MD, and the physician-psychologist team of Roger K. Cady, MD, and Kathleen Farmer, PsyD. I attended lectures and monitored my body and habits.

      Then I had a realization: