Migraine Care from an
Upper Cervical Chiropractor in Lutz, FL

Your first visit starts with a detailed migraine history: how often attacks happen, how long they last, what you take for them, and whether they began after an injury. We then perform a neurological and postural exam, use thermal imaging to look at nervous system stress patterns, and take precise upper cervical X-rays if they are clinically warranted.

Using Orthospinology, Dr. Brett Berner calculates the exact direction and angle of your atlas misalignment from those X-rays. The correction is delivered with a precision instrument at a light, controlled force while you lie on your side. There is no neck twisting or popping, which matters for migraine patients who often cannot tolerate forceful manipulation, especially during or after an attack.

We recheck after every correction and only adjust when the measurements say your atlas has shifted. As your alignment holds longer, visits become less frequent. We encourage you to keep a headache diary throughout care so we can track frequency, intensity and medication use objectively, and we are happy to share findings with your neurologist or primary care physician.

We think you deserve a straight answer about the science. The most cited study of upper cervical care for migraine is a 2015 observational pilot published in BioMed Research International. Eleven patients diagnosed with migraine by a neurologist received atlas corrections for eight weeks. The study's main imaging measure, intracranial compliance, did not change significantly across the group, though five of the eleven showed an increase. The patients did report a clinically meaningful drop in headache days and marked improvement on migraine-specific quality-of-life questionnaires.

That is encouraging, but it was small and had no control group, so it cannot prove the correction caused the improvement. Larger controlled trials are still needed. Broader research on manual therapy for migraine shows mixed results, which is one reason we use a gentle, measured procedure rather than general neck manipulation.

What we can say with confidence is that the upper neck and the migraine brain are anatomically linked, that many migraine patients have measurable upper cervical findings, and that a gentle correction carries a very low risk. We evaluate every patient individually and tell you plainly whether we think your migraines have a meaningful cervical component.

We do not ask anyone to choose between chiropractic care and their neurologist. Many of our migraine patients continue their preventive or rescue medications while under care, and some are able to discuss reducing them with their physician as their headache frequency changes. That conversation always belongs with the prescribing doctor.

We also look at the everyday factors that load the nervous system. Consistent sleep, regular meals, hydration, and reducing forward head posture at work all help hold a correction longer. When appropriate, we may recommend nutritional support through Foundation Nutrition or gentle vagus nerve stimulation to help calm an overactive stress response.