Julia Easterlin on Being a Performer with Migraine

Episode Transcript

Julia Easterlin:
(singing).

Dr. Correa:
Welcome back to the Brain & Life podcast by the American Academy of Neurology.

Dr. Nath:
And thanks to today's guest, Julia Easterlin for sharing her music with us and our listeners that we just heard now. And her story is our first episode about migraines.
So Daniel, I get these with flashing lights and kind of a funny zigzag line, and then I know something that's going to happen. Do you?

Dr. Correa:
Well, sometimes if I don't sleep well, I can get a headache. I've rarely had an episode that's really what we describe as migraine. Julia shares with us her story of living with migraines, even as training as an artist and a musician. And she even had an episode on stage of vision loss and still performed through her migraine. And the show must go on.

Dr. Nath:
Wait, what? It happened during the performance and so she just like couldn't see and kept playing?

Dr. Correa:
Yeah. Yeah. One time dancing and one time performing as a musician. It's remarkable. And she also talks about her struggle and the story of being a musician and just the realities of life and getting care and trying to make it and find not only a specialist, but just even see the doctors that she needs to see to help her manage her headaches and her migraine condition and still move forward enjoying her life and performing as a musician.

Dr. Nath:
I definitely will want to hear about that too. How does a traveling performer get an appointment with a neurologist, get to the pharmacy and get the meds? And hopefully they have insurance. I guess there's just a lot of issues that are going to come up.

Dr. Correa:
Yeah.

Dr. Nath:
So it's a treat to hear from her and her music. And next week we'll get to hear more music for her next guest, John Driskell Hopkins.

Dr. Correa:
Welcome back to the Brain & Life podcast. Today I'm glad to welcome musician and composer, Julia Easterlin.
I met Julia at this family while I was working in Augusta and have come to be a fan of her music. Julia studied at Berkeley College of Music on a full-merit scholarship. She was named one of 20 US Presidential Scholars in the Arts and has performed around the world, including TEDx LA, Lollapalooza, Cuba, Tibet, Cannes, Stockholm Jazz Festival, and Austin South by Southwest and is now based out of New York City.
She's known for her skills on various instruments, incorporating musical inspirations from jazz, gospel, folk, and using everything from electronic and looping and acoustic techniques. A large part of her musical work has also been collaborating with many other musicians. And throughout her travels and in making her art, at times, she's lived with severe migraines and has still found a way to share her craft.
Julia, thank you so much for opening up to us and the Brain & Life listeners.

Julia Easterlin:
Thank you so much for having me. This is such an honor. It's so cool.

Dr. Correa:
So Julia, you grew up in Augusta, Georgia in a very creative family. Can you tell us some about your childhood and when both music and migraines entered your life?

Julia Easterlin:
I have no clear memory of when either of those things actually entered my life. Both music and migraines have always been a part of my life and I don't actually remember a time before those things. My family in Georgia has a big farm, and a lot of my childhood was spent just running around woods and swamps and getting lost and eventually finding my way back. And a lot of the time walking around just sort of singing and using music as a way to keep myself company while I was in the woods.
Music became more of a real part of my life when I started singing in the church choir. I think the first time I remember doing that I was about eight and I was terrified. And I think the first time I have a clear memory of having a migraine, I was six or seven. It's fair to say, I was sort of terrified then as well. They were both scary experiences and both things that have continued to be a part of my life and I'm not so terrified by either of them anymore, thankfully.

Dr. Correa:
Were you the first person in your household to live with migraines or did you know what it might be?

Julia Easterlin:
No, I didn't know what it was. I knew that my head hurt. And I don't remember the first time I heard the word migraine. I think I was about eight or nine years old when I had missed so many days of school because of migraines that my parents were like, "Well, maybe we need to take a more serious look at this." I went to a doctor. I had a CAT scan or a CT, but I remember being in my bedroom when I was eight years old and kind of hearing my parents outside the door whispering about what's the diagnosis going to be. And I didn't exactly understand what was going on and I thought I might have a really special brain. My understanding of what could happen it was like, "Maybe I have powers." It was like that. It was that kind of thing.
And then I remember hearing my parents through the door when they finally got a call and they were like, "Okay, it's not what. It's not a brain tumor." And I was like, "Oh god, I didn't know they were looking for a brain tumor." And then I also was sort of disappointed that I didn't have powers.

Dr. Correa:
Children living with headaches and headache conditions it's such a challenge because sometimes they don't really know how to communicate it to their family or even to their friends and there's less of an awareness about it. And some kids don't even have a headache as their first symptoms. They have some of the other symptoms of headaches before it. But did you notice it earlier on that your head was hurting or did you have just very recurrent nausea or vomiting or other issues?

Julia Easterlin:
It was really that my head was hurting, and it's always been in about the same place. It starts in the kind of inner corner of my right eye and then sort of spreads from there. And I just remember telling teachers like, "Oh, I don't want to go outside for recess today because my head hurts." And luckily I have parents who were really responsive to that.

Dr. Correa:
As you got into your 20s and started to understand this was different than what other people were living with, were there certain things that any doctors or any other resources helped you learn to help manage the headaches?

Julia Easterlin:
Not really. I'm now 33 and until very recently I didn't understand that there maybe were more treatment options now than there were in the '90s. It sort of was brought to my attention that, yeah, no, your headaches are unusual when I was maybe 27 and I was dating someone who was like, "You take a lot of Advil very frequently." And I was just like, "Well, yeah, I have headaches." And they're like, "Yeah, but not a normal amount of headaches to be having," or, "I'm really concerned about the amount of Advil that you're consuming and its effects on the rest of your body." And I sort of was like, "Huh, yeah, I guess maybe this is something to think about." And then the rest of my life continued to happen and I had tours and this and that.
I didn't start seeking other treatment options until maybe the last three years because my photo sensitivity has gotten more extreme. Right now I'm facing my computer. In order to have light on my face I am facing the windows. The windows have some sheer curtains over them. It's a cloudy day. The light is coming through the windows. The left side of my face I'm very aware of this light coming through the windows and I have Advil in front of me because I'm like, "I'm going to need to take this within the next half hour." I go to restaurants, I have to always bring a hat because if there's, even in a very low light situation, if there's just a concentrated spot of light, it can cause a migraine within a few minutes.
So since that has become more of an issue in the last few years, I've started to go, "Man, I really don't want to live like this." My partner is a really big moviegoer. I have a really hard time going to the movies with him thinking about how much space in my brain is taken up by thoughts around anticipating pain and managing pain and imagining that other people don't have to.

Dr. Correa:
I totally understand and it's such a challenge to think of just all the little day-to-day things that can be affected, and migraine and headache being type of a chronic pain condition and pain and the uncertainty of when that pain will limit your function affecting so much of your time. And you were just talking about the day-to-day things and things related to just you and your partner and in a relationship, but you're a performer.

Julia Easterlin:
I know.

Dr. Correa:
I think all those things you talked about, you're on stage with music.

Julia Easterlin:
I know.

Dr. Correa:
With amplified sound.

Julia Easterlin:
Totally.

Dr. Correa:
And light.

Julia Easterlin:
It's like a sick cosmic joke of my life that the thing that I do involves specifically amplified sound and really bright lights, and that those are the two things that often can just totally debilitate me. I often take Advil before a performance. Usually the adrenaline of the performance is enough to get me through without feeling really impacted. And/or I sometimes just wear a hat during a show if I'm having a really headachey day. And then I often am also taking something after the show because then there will be this sort of surge of pain once the adrenaline drops.

Dr. Correa:
What has happened for you when you're performing and those things don't work and you've had a headache?

Julia Easterlin:
You just power it through. And I think my earliest recollection of this, I was about 14 and I was in a dance ensemble, and I had a migraine already. There was fluorescent lighting and I had to go on and do the dance. I cried, I was crying the whole time I was doing the dance. I just did a teary performance and then I got off stage and I felt so nauseated and so just completely drained.

Dr. Correa:
It illustrates, I think what's so important for people to understand that migraine headaches are not just I had a long day at work or I got stressed on the subway or on my drive home and now I have a little tension headache. Those can really impact and affect someone, yes. But this is a different level of a condition and it comes with many other symptoms. You talked about the sensitivity to light and sound. You've also mentioned changes in your vision and what has happened for you when you're trying to perform or just go through day to day.

Julia Easterlin:
If I don't catch a migraine soon enough, the center of my visual field will just become a sort of white blur and I only have peripheral vision. That did happen to me once during a dance performance. Luckily I had rehearsed enough in that particular space that I was able to make it through without any ... No one fell off the stage. There were no big injuries.
And the thing that really concerns me about losing my field of vision is driving. So because I work as a touring musician, half the year I'm spending several hours a day traveling. And a lot of that, if it's regional travel in the northeast or on the West Coast, up and down, it's in a car. And when I have the opportunity to help drive, I'm really wary of like, "Okay, how bright is it? How late are we going to be driving?"
Because another thing that happens for me is night driving people's headlights and people's brake lights are really troubling to me. I wear sunglasses driving at night because the headlights and the brake lights are so bothersome. But I do worry about, "Okay, what if I'm on a highway and the center of my visual field starts going blurry?"

Dr. Correa:
Since you've had so many limitations at times from the symptoms of your headache, as you just said, you've talked more recently in the last few years about possible treatments to help you manage or control how often you have the headaches, what has been your experience and journey with that and considering and picking other treatments?

Julia Easterlin:
I tried, I think it was Sumatriptan. And my experience with it was really alarming. I took it and I woke up the next morning and I was really twitchy and I felt very, very strange. And that actually really scared me more than the migraine itself. I just wasn't prepared for that. I'm not someone who's afraid of medication in general, but my experience with that particular drug scared me off of it. And I just went back to really high doses of Advil.
Most of my journey thus far has felt pretty unsuccessful and I don't even know if that's really the right word. I don't have a sense that I've found a clinician who I think takes my experience particularly seriously. So most of my own effort has just been around just understanding my triggers and trying to prevent migraines.

Dr. Correa:
What you're sharing points out. It's each person's unique response, not only to the medicines. Some medicines affect different people differently, or some medicines that can help take a headache away like Sumatriptan, but depending on how you feel with it. And all of the medicines, whether they're medicines to take a headache away or they're medicines to help prevent headaches, they're all a balance between how you feel on the medicine and the side effects and how much it actually helps reduce the migraine and the headaches and their other symptoms. So it has to be a tailored journey, and in picking medicines and talking about them and seeing how you feel with them. And for that it's important to find a clinician, whether it's your primary care doctor or a neurologist or a headache specialist.

Julia Easterlin:
Yeah.

Dr. Correa:
That is going to be your partner in that.

Julia Easterlin:
I'm a musician and I live in New York City. My income bracket is quite low and I have Medicaid. I haven't had great success navigating the options that my insurance will cover. And I think I've just felt sort of overwhelmed by that. In some ways it's easier to just keep doing what you have been doing, even if it's not entirely effective to figure out a new path. I feel like I've kind of plateaued in this space of focusing mostly on prevention.

Dr. Correa:
Like you, many artists like the painter Claude Monet and composers Claude Debussy and Gustav Mahler have lived with migraines and perceptual changes that they cause.

Julia Easterlin:
Yeah.

Dr. Correa:
How do you feel the migraines have affected your musical craft?

Julia Easterlin:
My migraines and my response to specific sounds absolutely have affected the way that I compose my own music because I'm really sensitive to aural textures. Like certain high frequencies, certain mid-range frequencies are too harsh for me. They will instantly give me head pain. And so in my own composition, in my own live performances and often in the things that I choose to participate in for other people's shows, I need them to be soft, I need them to be textures that don't cause me pain.

Dr. Correa:
You've given so much for us to think about and to talk with our fellow medical expert about and managing migraine and managing all the uncertainty and the pain issues that come with it. Julia, thank you so much for opening up to us, sharing really your personal experience living with migraine and some about your art. I look forward to getting back to listening some more of your music on SoundCloud. We'll have links to your website and SoundCloud and some of your other work. It's really been a pleasure.

Julia Easterlin:
Thank you so much for even just, I'm so thankful this podcast exists. I'm so thankful for this conversation you've had with me. And I do just also want to say the team of people working with you on this podcast are all such lovely, wonderful kind people. And so please just extend my thanks to all of them, and thank you so much for talking to me. Yeah.

Dr. Correa:
Wow. Thank you very much.

Julia Easterlin:
Thank you Dr. Correa.
(singing).

Dr. Correa:
Is this episode leaving you wanting more? Get the latest tips on healthy living and management for more than 250 neurologic conditions by visiting brainandlife.org where you can learn more about neurology every day powered by trusted neurologists.
Welcome back to the Brain and Life podcast. Today I'm here with friend and colleague Dr. Cynthia Armand from the Montefiore Headache Center here at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Dr. Armand has been a colleague here at Montefiore with me for several years. She's also one of my co-members of the Diversity and Equity and Inclusion Committee for our department. She helps run the Headache Fellowship program at Montefiore in Einstein.
She's worked on lecture series and websites for the community living with headaches and migraine disorders and has particularly developed a specialty in helping the underserved populations in headache. And we're really appreciating her time here to help and talk with us about migraine on our first migraine episode.

Dr. Armand:
Thank you so much Dr. Correa. I am happy to be here. Thanks for thinking of me and inviting me onto the podcast.

Dr. Correa:
We just had a great discussion with Julia Easterlin. She's a musician and composer. She grew up in the Augusta area, went to a musical school and performing art school, and all along the way, even now as a performer here in New York City, she has dealt with debilitating headaches sometimes causing vision loss and she's had to perform through that, either dancing or performing on stage, and day to day sometimes dealing with light sensitivity. Are these all similar issues to what you've dealt with with the community that you take care of with migraine?

Dr. Armand:
Absolutely. And as you discuss her story and tell me about what she's experienced, all I can say is that that's just incredible because migraine is a neurologic disease. It is marked by severe head pain and associated symptoms that can be quite debilitating. And the symptoms associated with this head pain may be even more debilitating than the head pain itself. So when you talk about all that she has had to deal with while functioning and maintaining what others view as normal activity and keeping up with activities and work and creativity, that's just incredible because it's so much to go up against.

Dr. Correa:
Sometimes we work long days, we don't sleep well. Many people out there are used to that and they might wake up with a little bit of a headache or develop a headache in the day. But how is that different from people who are really living with a migraine attack?

Dr. Armand:
So I really view as migraine being the brain on overdrive. So it's a disease of neuronal hyperactivity. And I know you specialize in epilepsy disorders, right?

Dr. Correa:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Armand:
We view that as a neurologic disease of hyperactivity, but in that instance the presentation can be seizures, different types of seizures. But in my instance of what I specialize in, this hyperactivity, the presentation are head pain with associated symptoms. So migraine in particular, it's severe head pain, usually marked by pain only on one side of the head. But we do know that it can be on both sides and there are associated symptoms. There can be nausea, vomiting, light and sound sensitivity, as well as something that we can call aura, which is basically a transient neurologic symptom that is reversible and it can involve difficulty with seeing, seeing something in your vision that moves across your visual field. It can be trouble speaking, getting words out, difficulty in comprehension, numbness, tingling in the body, weakness on one side of the body.
These symptoms can be particularly scary to the individual experiencing them. And you can imagine that keeping up with day to day and experiencing this ongoing can be quite challenging. And so while individuals are experiencing this, it is quite difficult for them to maintain a level of activity that is conducive to being productive in daily living. So individuals have difficulty with general understanding, keeping focus when they're performing activity or doing work.

Dr. Correa:
You talked about headache and particularly migraine as one of the types of headaches being overactivity, and there's some symptoms that seem to fall along with that. Julia talked about sound and light sensitivity. How do those fit in and are there other ones that kind of fit in that overactivity or overstimulation that can occur with migraine?

Dr. Armand:
We usually think about migraine in four phases. So there's the premonitory phase, there is the pain phase, there is the postdrome phase, and I also told you about the aura phase and that's not experienced by everyone, but it's usually preceding the pain phase.
So in the premonitory phase we do know that there are different levels of activity and different areas of the brain that light up on PET scans. And during that phase people can experience fatigue, difficulty concentrating, they might have some yawning associated with it. So that's the beginning of this neuronal activity that's occurring.

Dr. Correa:
And that's premonitory being pre-pain or pre the event?

Dr. Armand:
Exactly.

Dr. Correa:
Okay.

Dr. Armand:
Pre the event. So everything is starting to rev up. And then after that some individuals can experience aura. And then after the aura comes the pain phase. Again, you can go straight from premonitory to pain phase. And the pain phase is marked by pain in the head, can be moderate to severe. And along with that come the associated symptoms. Classically with the definition of migraine and the diagnosis, there's nausea, vomiting, light and sound sensitivity. But we do know individuals can experience other symptoms such as sensitivity to smell. There can be neck pain, back pain. They can have depressed levels of consciousness where they are so sleepy and tired that they're just wiped out and they can't function.
And after that pain phase kind of goes on, it seems like the brain is in this recovery mode where it kind of reverts to what could have occurred in the premonitory phase like yawning, sleepiness. But there's also this wipe out where they just feel, patients describe this as a hangover where the comprehension is depressed, they feel like they went through a pretty severe event and they're just trying to just recover from it and it's difficult at that point.
And many times this recovery phase can be even more severe than the pain phase because patients are still not back to normal. They're trying to get back to their baseline state, which for some people may be no pain. Some people may be a small moderate level of pain that may be negligible, but they're just not back to themselves yet.

Dr. Correa:
I've seen people describe and some people living with these conditions talk about that post-recovery phase as like a hangover. But I've also seen the term brain fog. Now we've been seeing brain fog mentioned with many different things. Is that term specific because we've seen it with COVID and other conditions. What does that mean?

Dr. Armand:
Right. Yeah. I really do view brain fog as something that is non-specific. It's really a situation where just as I described, like patients are not back to feeling themselves. Things are not clear. I have had some patients describe it as this caste that's over them mentally and not even mentally also, but just in what they're seeing. Things are dimmer, darker. They have difficulty understanding of what individuals are trying to tell them and difficulty with continuing to perform certain tasks. So it's this overhang feeling of heaviness, and this is as per my patients, fatigue and lack of clarity and sometimes confusion with what is happening. It's almost like things are in slow motion and they just can't quite get a sense of things being nice and crisp and what they're performing, what they're seeing, what they're hearing.

Dr. Correa:
One of the other things you mentioned was aura. And so aura coming maybe right before that pain or sometimes even progressing along with the headache pain. But what is aura and how does that ... is that something that every person with migraine has? And how does that affect where you're approaching things in terms of treatments?

Dr. Armand:
As we view aura, it's a fully reversible neurologic symptom. An aura can be visual. It can be sensory. It can involve speech and language. It can be motor where people lose strength on one side of their body. It can be brainstem aura where there's vertigo, there's loss of consciousness. And also can be retinal where the eye is affected.
And what's happening is that in the diagnosis criteria you have these symptoms that are added that can come prior to the head pain phase classically, and it spreads gradually over five minutes. And that's really important because a lot of the times these aura symptoms can be almost like someone's having a stroke. But we do know classically stroke is an abrupt onset occasion, right? Abrupt onset event. The classic aura we know of is something visual, it develops on one side of the visual field and it goes across. It could be a shimmering light over five minutes. We know that usually it is no more than 60 minutes in terms of how long it lasts. It can be accompanied by head pain or followed by head pain. But we do know in some instances it can just be aura itself that someone can experience without the head pain.
And the most important point that I want to emphasize with aura is that when I'm seeing women with aura, so women who are diagnosed with migraine with aura, they do have a higher chance of developing a stroke later in life as compared to the general population. So that is a small percentage, but it's still there. So when we diagnose aura in women, we talk to them about stroke-like symptoms and what to do, when they should be calling 911 so that they're aware. And when we're thinking about aura therapy in these women, it's important to speak to their GYN and let them know that's the case because if they're thinking about certain medications like exogenous estrogens, estrogens themselves carry stroke risk as well. So these women, there would have to be a risk-benefit conversation about starting estrogen therapy if they have migraine with aura.

Dr. Correa:
Does every headache that knocks you out from being able to do other activities, are those all migraines, or is that not necessarily the case? And what are some of the other types of headaches that you see in your clinic that knock you out?

Dr. Armand:
We don't only see migraine at our headache center. That is one of the more common headache types neurologic diseases that we do take care of. But when we talk about primary headache types, meaning headache types that arise that are intrinsic to the brain, there are others that have other associated symptoms that can also knock someone out. So there are trigeminal autonomic cephalgias. Those are a group of primary headaches that usually the pain is experienced on one side of the head and there are associated trigeminal autonomic symptoms such as tearing of the eye on the side of the pain, running of the nostril on that side of the pain, flushing of the face on that side of the pain.
And those types of headaches, for example, cluster headache is one of them, hemicrania continua is one of them, paroxysmal hemicrania is one of them. Those headaches can be very debilitating. In particular with cluster headache, that is a circannual and circadian type of headache pattern. They're extremely debilitative. It's the worst pain that they've experienced in their lives. So we're talking about that headache type. And when we think about migraine, it's very different in terms of associated symptoms and when the attacks occur, but they both can be debilitating to the individual experiencing them.

Dr. Correa:
It sounds like there's a lot of unique types of headaches and it's important, particularly if you're having a headache that's limiting you from being able to get things done, that you try to seek out the opportunity to speak with a neurologist or maybe even look for your local headache center. And for any of you who are interested in some of the names of these types of headaches, the Brain & Life website and magazine has more information and the American Headache Society are great resources. Make sure you're also getting information from a reliable resource about these types of headaches.
There's also the challenge that Julia shared with us that over the years working as an artist, that has limited sometimes her ability to both get health insurance and to pay and see the doctors she needs to. And this is something you've worked a lot with various communities. Tell us some about the challenges that some communities have in getting the care that they need for their headaches.

Dr. Armand:
There's a lot to do with access and there's access in different realms, right? So there's access geographically where the nearest neurologists that you can see that may understand a bit more about what you're experiencing may be a ways away from where you live. It may take a lot for you to get there in terms of money, transportation, in terms of time. So the access is a challenge. Health insurance is also a challenge. There are different tiers of health insurance and many of the medications that are out there that are new are quite expensive and not everyone wants to pay for them.
Fortunately, there are some prescription programs that are available that can help with funding. Many times you can write a letter to some of these companies and they can actually give you the medication for free for up to a year. Not everyone, but that can be an option for individuals. So insurance and costs can be an issue in terms of access.
And also other barriers that people face are when we think about the pediatric population and we think about family members. Are there supportive family members that understand what's happening? And do you have to keep trying to explain what is happening? So I say peds, but also in adults as well. It's difficult to get to the doctor and have to prove that you're sick when you don't have that support at home. So that's sometimes something that people face.
And I see both. I see the reverse. I see where spouses bring their significant other in because something is wrong and the person who's experiencing the pain doesn't want to acknowledge it or culturally there may be something where they shouldn't be talking about their pain. Or I see someone who's not come in for help because family members have dismissed and said, "Oh, that's nothing." I think all of that really plays a role in terms of barriers to seeking care, getting an appropriate and prompt diagnosis and really receiving treatment.

Dr. Correa:
So I mean we talk about often how yes, it would be great if people have these headache conditions that are dealing with them chronically that they get to see a headache specialist. But as you said, unfortunately that's not always the access that people have. What are some resources that might help people find those specialists and those doctors that may be available to them or ways that they can find centers to reach out to and see if they can get an appointment or have their questions answered?

Dr. Armand:
I really believe that primary care physicians really hold the key because they are individuals who more often than not are seeing someone over an evolution and they've getting to know patients over a long period of time. And so I really do think that they are more than capable of helping our patients with migraine disease or different headache disorders.
Now, they can phone a friend and consult to your fellow neurologist like you and I, but I do think that is a terrific place to start. So I don't want patients to feel as though they have a primary care that's not good enough. They should definitely go see a neurologist. Talk to your primary care doctor. Open up to your primary care doctor. Make sure they know everything because a lot of the times they are connecting the dots and they're quite good at connecting the dots before you get to see that specialist.
So aside from perhaps asking for a referral from your primary care, if you want to do some digging yourself, I really like the American Migraine Foundation. It's a very comprehensive organization that really is dedicated to educating and helping individuals with migraine disease. Their website is phenomenal in terms of the depth of education that individuals can receive.
The other part of their website that I really like is that they have a section for finding a headache specialist. It's like find a doctor. You go to that section, you write your zip code or where you live, and it basically gives you a list of doctors and you can decide the mile radius.
The other thing that might be really frustrating in terms of getting care is the amount of wait times that individuals could experience. I know for our center we have a wait time, I think of about six months to a year, and it's just, demand is really high and the amount of physicians in that radius is lower than should be, which is why we are recruiting. In headache medicine in general, we want more headache specialists.
So I think it's important to not be discouraged by the fact that there is a long wait list. If they give you an appointment, take it, take the appointment, go back to that list to see if any of those doctors have a sooner appointment. But it's always good to take that appointment and also continue discussions with your primary care.

Dr. Correa:
And are there certain resources, whether it's through the American Migraine Foundation or other resources where people can look at some things to do and work on while they're waiting to make that appointment, whether it's with the neurologist or headache specialist?

Dr. Armand:
So that resource, the American Migraine Foundation, it's a trusted resource. There are different articles that talk about many of the headache types and they talk about treatment strategies that you can be utilizing, lifestyle measures that you can utilize. And what I do want to say is that definitely if you are thinking you have migraine or any other headache type, if you're using these resources, share that with your primary care because what if you don't have migraine and you're reading these resources and you're not getting better. So it's important to share what you're utilizing with a trusted healthcare professional so that you can be steered and guided into the right direction.

Dr. Correa:
Well, Dr. Armand, thank you so much taking the time out of your day and for all that you do for the community living with headache and headache disorders and for being here with us and helping talk to us and to our listeners about migraine and different types of headache conditions and really sharing your own perspective.

Dr. Armand:
Thank you so much Dr. Correa. It was wonderful to have this dialogue with you. And thank you for all that you do with the AAN and the Brain & Life podcast. This is phenomenal.

Dr. Correa:
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Dr. Nath:
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Dr. Nath:
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Dr. Correa:
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Dr. Correa:
Daniel Correa, joining you from New York City and online @NeuroDrCorrea.

Dr. Nath:
And Audrey Nath, beaming in from Texas and on Twitter @AudreyNathMDPhD.

Dr. Correa:
Thank you to our community members that trust us with their health and everyone living with neurologic conditions. We hope together we can take steps to better brain health and each thrive with our own abilities every day.

Dr. Nath:
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Dr. Correa:
We'd really appreciate it if you could give us five stars and leave a review.

Dr. Nath:
Thank you.

Dr. Correa:
This helps others find the Brain & Life podcast. Thanks again. See you next week.

Julia Easterlin on Being a Performer with Migraine

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