Healthy Habits: Breakthrough Cure for Migraine Sufferers

Many people suffer with migraine headaches on a daily basis. The headaches can be completely debilitating and cause a person to miss work, and lose their personal relationships. Now there is a revolutionary procedure being conducted by Dr. Kaveh Alizadeh, the director of WMC Headache Specialists that is bringing 24-hour relief to migraine sufferers.

For the proper candidate, Dr. Alizadeh performs surgery to decompress the nerves in a patient’s head that are causing the migraines. According to Dr. Alizadeh, “It’s a simple procedure that results in significant improvement for 90 percent of patients. Sixty percent of patients are completely cured.”

Surgery is, of course, never the first option for helping patients with migraines, however, some patients don’t find relief with other treatments such as medications and nerve blocking agents. Dr. Alizadeh notes that approximately 10 percent of sufferers are candidates for this procedure.

Dr. Alizadeh, who is Westchester Medical Center’s Chief of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, and Associate Professor of Surgery at New York Medical College, co-founded the WMC’s Headache Specialists group in October 2018. The multi-disciplinary team of experts includes internists, pain management specialists, neurologists, psychiatrists, and plastic surgeons.

Each new patient is thoroughly examined by the team to determine the nature of their headaches, the previous treatments they have received and if they are proper candidates for surgery; if a patient is a candidate, Dr. Alizadeh and his colleagues track the nerves in the patient’s head and then he minutely widens the entrances through which the nerves travel relieving pressure points and enabling them to properly transmit signals. His latest innovation is to wrap the nerve in a biologic blanket that protects it from scarring.

Success in relieving his patient’s migraine related pain has brought great joy to Dr. Alizadeh who says, “This is extremely gratifying work. Our patients always say they wish they had done this surgery sooner. One patient told me it was like they had been living in black and white and this is the first time they are seeing in color.”