The Migraine That Started It All (A Case I’ll Never Forget)
Because sometimes the pain is only part of the story.
Her name was Kaci.
Born in 2001.
Young, sharp, and pushing through graduate school while her body fell apart underneath her.
By the time she found me, she’d been living with migraines for nearly a decade.
But in the past year, they’d taken over everything.
Daily pain.
Blurry vision.
Nausea.
Pins and needles in her head and neck.
Fatigue so deep it made thinking hard.
Anxiety layered on top of all of it.
And then there was the numbness—
In her lips.
Her jaw.
Her cheeks.
Her hands.
“It just keeps getting worse,” she said.
“No one can tell me why.”
She wasn’t new to the system.
Kaci had already done it all.
She’d seen the neurologists.
She’d tried the Botox.
She was on Qulipta, Cambia, and Venlafaxine when she came in—plus every preventive and abortive drug they’d ever offered her.
She was doing the “right things.”
But her body wasn’t responding.
Because no one was looking in the one place that mattered most.
Here’s what they missed.
When I evaluated her, I wasn’t just looking for a diagnosis.
I was looking at her nervous system.
We ran Functional Nervous System Testing and biomechanical motion X-rays of her upper neck.
And what we found made perfect sense.
Her craniocervical junction—the place where the base of the skull meets the top two bones in the neck—was misaligned.
That misalignment was:
Compressing her brainstem
Disrupting cerebrospinal fluid flow
Throwing off vascular supply
Overloading her vagus nerve
And keeping her nervous system stuck in fight-or-flight mode
The result?
A body that couldn’t regulate pain.
A brain that couldn’t reset.
A young woman whose life was on pause while her symptoms spiraled.
Her migraines weren’t random.
They were the result of a system under pressure for far too long.
And the numbness? That was her nervous system signaling overload in real time.
We started care immediately.
No twisting.
No cracking.
Just a precise upper cervical correction designed to remove the pressure, restore balance, and give her brain a chance to come back online.
After her adjustments, she rested in a zero-gravity chair to help her nervous system integrate the changes.
Then we began tracking her recovery, not just treating her pain.
The goal wasn’t to give her another temporary fix.
It was to give her her life back.
And that’s what happened.
Her symptoms started to shift.
✔ The daily migraines became less frequent
✔ The dizziness and visual disturbances started to fade
✔ The numbness began to resolve
✔ And for the first time in years—she felt hopeful
Why am I sharing this?
Because stories like Kaci’s are everywhere.
Women who’ve been told:
“It’s just stress”
“It’s probably hormonal”
“Let’s try another medication”
…when what they really need is someone to check the one place no one ever looks.
The base of the skull.
The brainstem.
The craniocervical junction.
This is what I check—every single day.
Because it’s often where the real problem begins.
Ready to find out what your nervous system is trying to say?
I offer a 30-minute virtual session called the Migraine Mastermind.
We walk through your case, evaluate the patterns most providers miss, and build your personalized Migraine Optimization Plan.
📅 Book your session here: www.migrainemastermind.com
Because you’re not crazy.
You’re not broken.
You’re just looking for answers in a world that hasn’t been trained to ask the right questions.
Let’s change that.
As I always say…
Fix your neck. Fix your life.
Be blessed,
Dr. Brandon Brown
The Migraine Doc & The Specific Chiropractic Centers of Richardson Tx