If you live with chronic migraines, you already know the pattern. The throbbing on one side of the head. The sensitivity to light that sends you into a dark room. The nausea. The way everything shuts down for hours or days, and the way you have had to plan your life around when the next one might come.

You have probably tried the medications. Triptans for when an attack starts. Preventives to try to keep them from starting. Maybe beta blockers. Maybe antidepressants used off-label. Maybe injections. Each one brings partial relief, side effects, or both — and the migraines keep coming back.

Dr. Laurel Griffin knows that pattern personally. She lived it for years. Starting at age 10, her migraines became constant. By her late teens, she had a three-month migraine that never broke. Fibromyalgia layered on top of it. She went to a chiropractor three times a week for a year and got an hour of relief at a time before the pain returned. Nothing resolved it — until she was introduced to the Atlas Orthogonal technique. She has not had a migraine since 2002.

Her story is not typical of migraine patients. But the reason it worked is something most chronic migraine sufferers in Des Moines have never had explained to them.

The Cervicogenic Pathway

Migraines are often treated as a neurological condition isolated to the brain. But for a significant number of chronic migraine patients, the trigger is not in the brain — it is in the upper cervical spine.

The atlas — the first vertebra at the top of the neck — sits directly beneath the skull and surrounds some of the most critical neurovascular structures in the body. When the atlas is misaligned, even by a millimeter, it can create mechanical stress on those structures. The result is a pattern that looks neurologically identical to what patients describe as classic migraine: the throbbing, the visual aura, the nausea, the light sensitivity.

This is called a cervicogenic migraine — a migraine driven by the cervical spine. And because the migraine medications are not treating the cervical spine, they do not resolve the cause. They blunt the symptoms, often only partially, while the mechanical driver continues to produce new episodes.

Why Preventives Often Do Not Fully Work

Preventive migraine medications are designed to raise the threshold at which an attack starts. That strategy works when the brain itself is the primary driver.

When the trigger is mechanical — when the upper cervical spine is creating the neurovascular stress — raising the threshold only means the attacks come slightly less often or slightly less severely. The underlying cause continues to produce them.

This is why many chronic migraine patients find themselves cycling through three, four, or five preventive medications over the course of years. Each one helps a little. None of them solves the problem.

What a Proper Diagnostic Workup Looks Like

For a patient with chronic migraines, the question we work to answer at Precision Chiropractic West in West Des Moines is simple: is the cervical spine driving this pattern? If it is, correcting the underlying alignment can change everything. If it is not, we will tell you that too, and help direct you to the right kind of care.

The workup begins with a thorough history of the migraine pattern — when they started, what triggers them, how they have responded to prior treatment, and any history of head or neck trauma the patient may not have connected to the headaches. It includes a physical and neurological examination. It often includes a review of existing imaging. And when the clinical picture suggests cervical involvement, a Digital Motion X-Ray (DMX) study is the diagnostic tool that shows us, definitively, whether there is aberrant motion or instability at the upper cervical level.

Precision Chiropractic West operates the only DMX imaging center in Iowa. For chronic migraine patients who have been through the full medical workup without answers, it is often the piece of the picture that has been missing.

The Atlas Orthogonal Correction

When the imaging and clinical findings identify upper cervical misalignment as the driver, the correction itself is precise and specific. The Atlas Orthogonal technique uses a percussion instrument — calibrated to the patient’s individual cervical measurements — to reposition the atlas without any twisting or manual manipulation. Patients often describe it as anticlimactic: it does not feel like a traditional chiropractic adjustment, and yet the structural change it produces is measurable and verifiable on repeat imaging.

Not every migraine patient responds the way Dr. Griffin did. Response depends on how long the pattern has been in place, whether there are additional factors involved, and how consistently the patient commits to the care plan. But for patients whose migraines trace to the upper cervical spine, the approach offers something that medication cannot: it addresses the cause rather than suppressing the effect.

If You Live in the Des Moines Area

Chronic migraines are not something you have to live with forever, and they are not something you have to keep managing with medications that only partly work. The first step is a diagnostic conversation — not a sales pitch, not a promise, just a careful look at whether the cervical spine is the piece no one has examined yet.

That conversation is available to you in West Des Moines. And if the answer is yes — if your migraines are coming from your neck — you have options you probably have not been offered before.

If Migraines Are Part of Your Daily Life

Schedule a consultation at Precision Chiropractic West. We will review your history, your imaging, and your migraine pattern — and tell you honestly whether the upper cervical spine may be the source.

SCHEDULE YOUR CONSULTATION