Relief for menstrual headaches with food

Treatments for menstrual headaches:
Menstrual headaches affect many women, especially the ones who are approaching menopause. Menstrual headaches usually last for the whole menopause transition (untill the mid 50's). Menopause is not an illness, but a natural process in a woman's body. The symptoms of menopause are just indicators of changes between the hormones estrogen, testosterone and progesterone. These changes result in a hormonal imbalance in a woman's body and cause menstrual headaches.

Though the pharmaceutical companies would have you believe that for the treatment of hormonal imbalance, drugs are the best solution, that isn't the case. Before you make the choice of taking synthetic hormones, you might want to consider less risky approaches, like alternative medicine or lifestyle changes. The medical establishment is becoming increasingly interested in alternative medicine since breast and ovarian cancer as well as heart diseases, blood clots and other side effects are associated with conventional HRT treatment.

Three ways of relief for menstrual headaches:
Three ways of relief can be considered for treating menstrual headaches. These are categorized as: (1) Lifestyle Changes, (2) Alternative Medicine and (3) Drugs and Surgery. You should always start with the least risky ways of relief (lifestyle changes) and go on to riskier ways of relief (surgery/drugs) only if necessary.

(1) LIFESTYLE CHANGES
menstrual headaches and food and relief

The first level involves no risk but may be the hardest way to go. You'll have to restrict yourself from many things. So if you are considering this approach, you will need a strong mind and a positive thinking for managing these changes. Surprisingly, there has been less research on how lifestyle changes can affect hormonal imbalance. Nonetheless, techniques for stress reduction (e.g. yoga), a diet rich in estrogenic food (soy, apples, alfalfa, cherries, potatoes, rice, wheat and yams and other food) or even becoming more fit by doing regular exercises, will have positive effects on the treatment of menstrual headaches.

It's not easy to follow up this approach, that's why you might want to consider the next level of treatment. Alternative medicine has proven to be excellent for treating menstrual headaches in a natural and safe way.

(2) ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE
Alternative ways of relief involve little or no risk and can be considered as the best and safest way for treating menstrual headaches. In this level of ways of relief, Herbal remedies and Acupuncture established themselves as the best treatments. Acupuncture is a Chinese medical treatment involving the insertion of very fine sterile needles into the body at specific points according to a mapping of "energy pathways". It's an excellent treatment, but complicated to follow. A successful acupuncture treatment involves time, money and finding the right practitioner. Therefore, most women are looking for less complicated ways of alternative treatment and think herbal remedies are a safe and effective solution.

There are basically two types of herbs for treating menstrual headaches: phytoestrogen and non-estrogenic herbs. The phytoestrogen herbs (e.g. Black Cohosh, Dong Quai) contain estrogenic components produced by plants. Though, these herbs are good for treating low hormone levels, because they replace some of the missing estrogen hormones, they aren't the best solution for treating hormonal imbalance. As a result of adding hormones from outside, your body will become less responsive to produce estrogen on its own. This causes a further decrease of body-own hormone levels.

Unlike phytoestrogen herbs, non-estrogenic herbs, as its name suggests, don't contain any estrogen. These herbs nourish your hormonal glands into producing more efficiently your own natural hormones. This ultimately ends up in balancing not only estrogen, but also progesterone and testosterone. In other words, non-estrogenic herbs stimulate your own hormone production, by inducing the optimal functioning of the pituitary and endocrine glands. Due to this, non-estrogenic herbs, like Macafem, can be considered as the safest way to treat menstrual headaches naturally.

A combination of approaches is a good route to take. Lifestyle changes combined with alternative medicine will probably take care of the hormonal imbalance in a more efficiently way. Nonetheless, there will always be some women who need or want to go through the third level of approach. Side effects are inevitable, but sometimes these are worth if considered the relief this approach provides.

(3) DRUGS AND SURGERY
Interventions at level 3 involve the highest risk and often the highest costs. The most common drug therapy for treating menstrual headaches in the US is hormone replacement therapy (HRT). There's no doubt that this is the quickest and strongest way to combat hormonal imbalance; but, unfortunately, it entails serious side effects and increases the risk of different cancer types among women, as the following study has proven.

menstrual headaches and food and relief information In 1991 the National Institute of Health (NIH) launched the Women's Health Initiative (WHI), the largest clinical trial ever undertaken in the United States . The WHI was designed to provide answers concerning possible benefits and risks associated with use of hormone replacement therapy (HRT). This study was canceled in July 2002, after it was proven that synthetic hormones increase risks of ovarian and breast cancer as well as heart disease, blood clots and strokes. The findings were published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association.

If you still want to consider this approach, take a visit to your physician, and be more informed about what this treatment option involves.

These three levels of approaches are not mutually exclusive. You can use different approaches at different times or combine several at the same time. Nowadays more and more women think dealing with menstrual headaches is best accomplished via a combination of healthy lifestyle and alternative treatments.