Migraines
Functional medicine support tailored to uncover the root cause of complex symptoms.
Consult with our care team to understand next steps and build a personalized plan.
Serving Denver Metro, Fort Collins, and Colorado Springs.
About This Condition
Migraine is a recurrent primary headache disorder characterized by attacks of moderate to severe head pain, often unilateral and pulsating, associated with sensory hypersensitivity and autonomic symptoms. Attacks typically last from several hours up to a few days and can be disabling, interfering with daily activities, work, and quality of life. Migraine occurs with or without aura, and many patients have a family history of similar headaches.
Typical features include throbbing or pulsating head pain, nausea or vomiting, and sensitivity to light, sound, and sometimes smell or movement. Physical activity often worsens symptoms, prompting patients to seek a dark, quiet environment during attacks. A subset of individuals experience transient neurologic symptoms known as aura, such as visual disturbances, sensory changes, or language difficulty, which usually precede or accompany the headache phase.
Migraine attacks are often triggered by a combination of biologic and environmental factors, including hormonal changes, sleep disruption, stress, missed meals, certain foods or alcohol, and weather changes. Over time, some individuals transition from episodic migraine to high-frequency or chronic migraine, particularly when attacks are frequent, inadequately treated, or complicated by medication overuse or comorbid conditions.
Common Symptoms
- •Recurrent moderate to severe headache episodes, often unilateral and pulsating or throbbing in quality
- •Headache worsened by routine physical activity, movement, or changes in position
- •Sensitivity to light (photophobia), sound (phonophobia), and sometimes smell or movement during attacks
- •Nausea, with or without vomiting, accompanying or following headache onset
- •Visual disturbances such as flashing lights, zigzag lines, scotomas, or transient visual field defects in patients with aura
- •Sensory changes, such as tingling or numbness, or transient language disturbance as part of aura in some individuals
- •Prodromal or postdromal symptoms such as fatigue, irritability, difficulty concentrating, yawning, or neck discomfort
Conventional Treatment Options
Trigger diary and nutrition
Sleep/stress strategies
Supplement support where appropriate
Our Functional Medicine Approach
Triptans treat attacks. They don't fix the wiring.
Most patients arrive with a stack of triggers they've tried to eliminate — wine, chocolate, weather, screens, perfume — and a prescription bottle they use when the attack lands anyway. That's life management, not problem-solving. Persistent migraines almost always have upstream contributors: estrogen / progesterone shifts, blood sugar volatility, sleep architecture, gut-derived inflammation, magnesium and CoQ10 status, mitochondrial efficiency, and autonomic dysregulation.
How Spire works the root cause
Our Unexplained Symptoms Program runs a structured migraine workup — hormone mapping (especially around perimenopause), continuous glucose monitoring where the timing fits, magnesium / B-vitamin / CoQ10 status, food sensitivity work, and autonomic testing when histamine or POTS overlap is suspected. We then phase interventions by likelihood-to-help rather than throwing every supplement at the wall.
Who this is for
Adults with recurrent migraine who are tired of trigger-avoidance as a full strategy, women whose attacks track hormonal cycles, patients with new-onset migraines after illness or major life shifts, and anyone who wants a workup before adding another preventive medication.