Amanda Richardson, BCDFN, CFNC
What Conventional Medicine Hasn't Told You About Migraine.
Where migraine research gets personal.
Amanda Richardson, BCDFN, CFNC is a Board Certified Doctor of Functional Nutrition, researcher, and publisher of Migraine Unread, dedicated to finding the why behind complex migraine and headache that conventional medicine is still searching for. Because she lives it.
Healing and curing are not the same thing. Understanding the difference changes everything.
Sarah is a 44 year old woman who started seeing a gastroenterologist three months ago for intermittent nausea and vomiting that wouldn't resolve. She also had headaches and was dizzy at times. It was difficult for her to figure out if the nausea was related to the dizzy spells because everything felt so off. The doctor focused on what he was trained to focus on, the gastric issue he specialized in. The headaches and the dizziness weren't his department.
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Over the course of several thousand dollars in tests and labwork they were able to rule out all the usual suspects. H. Pylori, peptic ulcers, pancreatic and gallbladder issues, as well as cancer indicators. She had mild GERD but nothing that would explain this level of symptoms. Nothing that added up to what Sarah was living.
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It was only toward the end of the workup that she mentioned her periods had been very heavy and irregular for the past six months. The changes had started three months before she ever walked into his office, and she'd chalked them up to stress. It didn't seem like something a stomach doctor needed to know. He noted it in the chart and moved on.
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When the doctor left the room a nurse came in to see her out. Sarah asked about a follow up appointment. The nurse said there wasn't one. Sarah pressed, explaining she was still nauseous and still didn't have any answers. The nurse rushed her down the hall and as she walked away mentioned she could chew some peppermint gum if it was really that bad.
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Devastated and alone, Sarah went home. She was recently divorced and the single parent of two small children. She made dinner for the kids that night, ignoring the pain rumbling behind her right eye, tucked them in after story time, and fell asleep on the couch.
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She was awakened at 3am for the fourth time that month with an urgent need to vomit and her eye was throbbing. As she retched she thought her eyeball would explode out of her head. She knew something was wrong.
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That night finally earned Sarah a referral to neurology. The MRI was clean. The bloodwork unremarkable. The neurologist did exactly what a good neurologist should do. He ruled out the things that could hurt her, gave her pain a name, a prescription, and a follow-up in three months.
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And none of that was wrong. That workup matters. Headaches that start out of nowhere at 44 and wake you from sleep need imaging, full stop. If you're living Sarah's story, do not skip that step.
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But notice what happened. The scan answered the doctor's question: is something dangerous causing this? It never answered Sarah's: why is this happening to me? Conventional medicine is brilliant at ruling out catastrophe. It just stops asking once catastrophe is off the table.
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So Sarah walked out with a name for her pain and no story behind it.
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What she didn't know was migraine. She had never experienced headaches before any of this began. Throughout her childhood and college years she was a healthy, happy kid. Her marriage was good until it wasn't. Two years prior her entire world was knocked on its side and Sarah became a single parent almost overnight.
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Her body went into fight or flight and idled there for two years.
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But recently things had calmed down. The kids were finally settled and happy in their new school. She had just bought a house on her own. Her business gave her the flexibility to be there when her kids needed her. She had even recently started dating someone.
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So why now, when Sarah's life had finally found some stillness, was her body seemingly rejecting it?
Meet Sarah.
What does all of this add up to?
First, that stillness might be exactly why her body is finally speaking. This is a well documented phenomenon* sometimes called a letdown migraine, where attacks emerge not during acute stress but in the window after it releases. The nervous system has been in survival mode for two years. When the threat finally lifts it doesn't quietly stand down. It sends up everything it's been holding.
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But there are more variables here, and the next thing I'd want to know more about is what her happy healthy childhood actually looked like. Because healthy and happy doesn't always mean without stress, and the body keeps a record that the mind doesn't always have access to. I'd also want to know whether any doctor took hormone panels and evaluated them against her symptoms, not just compared the numbers to a population average. Heavy irregular periods in the context of new onset migraine is not a coincidence. It's a signal worth reading.
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Here's where I'd start. A CGRP blocker to get the crisis under control is reasonable, even welcome. Sarah needs her life back before she can do any deeper work. But here's what concerns me. A woman in her position rarely leaves these appointments with just one prescription. There's often an SSRI offered too, to manage the weight of a life in flux. And the weight of that life is exactly what may be driving the migraines. Medicate the distress signal before anyone reads it, and the signal is gone. Before we layer anything else on, Sarah needs a baseline. We need to hear what her body is saying without three voices talking over it.
Then the hormones. Sarah is 44, with six months of heavy, irregular periods. That isn't a footnote, that's perimenopause announcing itself, and estrogen that swings and drops is one of the best documented migraine triggers there is. And while we're reading that signal, six months of bleeding like that demands a ferritin check, because routine bloodwork can look normal while iron stores quietly run empty, and iron deficiency alone can leave you dizzy and drained. It's one more thing her doctors never connected. So let's not reach for HRT just yet, let's understand why this is happening now. Let's get a baseline when she's not in crisis. Let's calm her nervous system first and listen to what it's been trying to say.
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Because Sarah isn't a mystery. She's a pattern that's been waiting for someone to read it correctly.
Sarah is a composite. No single patient lived this exact story, but every detail in it comes from real experiences that people with migraine will recognize. Her story is shared for education, not as medical advice, and it isn't a substitute for care from your own providers. If her symptoms sound like yours, especially a new or changing headache, please don't skip the workup. Start there.
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About Amanda Richardson, Doctor of Functional Nutrition
"I decided to change my story. Migraine would not define me or dictate my life."
A few years ago I sat for two weeks waiting on biopsy results for an enlarged lymph node. I found out later the results had come back on day three. When the nurse practitioner finally walked in, she was holding a printout, because she'd had to look up my diagnosis herself: Castleman disease. She told me it was a one-time thing and I'd be fine.
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I wasn't satisfied with that. So I built my own team. A functional medicine doctor, an oncologist, an ENT. After a CT scan found two more enlarged lymph nodes chemotherapy came onto the table. But by the time the PET scan followed, I had already begun changing everything, my nutrition, red light therapy, sound therapy, the earliest versions of the work I practice now. The PET showed the nodes slightly smaller. I insisted on going back to ENT for another look. By then one node couldn't be found at all, and the other had shrunk significantly. My oncologist agreed: no chemotherapy. We would monitor instead. Two years later with appointments every six months, I'm still clear.
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I can't tell you exactly which piece did what. What I can tell you is what the imaging and bloodwork showed, scan after scan, one blood draw after another that my body healed in ways I was told were impossible. Once you experience something like that, you cannot just sit on it.
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My hemiplegic migraines are the longer arc of the same story. Five prescriptions once managed my days, while every neurologist offered me the same sentence: this is your life now, learn to manage it. I didn't believe that had to be my story. Today the migraines that ruled my life are significantly reduced, and I live without any of those five prescriptions. I'll say plainly what that is and isn't. It's my outcome, not a path I'd hand you, and nobody should change their medications outside a conversation with their own prescriber. But it's why I will never accept "you'll just have to live with it" as a complete answer, not for me, and not for anyone sitting across from me.
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So I went back. I pursued board certification, began researching and connecting dots that explained what was happening in my body and why. Because what changed things for me was not a protocol someone handed me. It was finally understanding the full picture, which was not just my head or a lymph node but my entire body. The nervous system patterns that started in childhood. The nutritional depletions that accumulated quietly for decades. The cortisol dysregulation that nobody connected to the migraines. The gut history that wasn't just dismissed, it was made worse, with doctors prescribing medications that caused additional stomach issues.
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All of it was there in the data the whole time. Nobody had been trained to read it as one whole person.
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I am Amanda Richardson, BCDFN, CFNC, Board Certified Doctor of Functional Nutrition, researcher, and publisher of Migraine Unread. I am building a foundation that conventional migraine care never offered me, and I write about it so practitioners and patients alike can finally start reading the signals that were always there.
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And for the individual who is ready to go deep on their own history, that door is always open.
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Follow along on Migraine Unread.
The research, the thinking, and the clinical foundation behind the work, published as it develops.
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Migraine Unread is where Amanda Richardson, BCDFN, CFNC shares. About decades of living inside a body nobody fully understood. About dots she finally connected when no one else was looking. About what healing looks like when it is not the same thing as curing. Personal, clinical, and written from inside the experience.
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Long form, deeply personal, researched, and grounded in decades of lived experience. It is not a blog. It is a body of work in progress, constantly growing and evolving, written for anyone who wants to understand complex migraine and chronic headache at a level nobody has taken them to before.
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"She's a pattern that's been waiting for someone to read it correctly."
Migraine Hides Inside Other Stories.
If you're practicing through a functional or integrative lens, you're already asking better questions than most. You're looking at the whole person. You're thinking about what's driving the condition.
I'm not here to teach you any of that. It's already your practice.
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I'm here because migraine is its own animal. It hides inside other stories. The patient who's been told it's anxiety. The one whose symptoms keep shifting in ways that don't quite fit any clean diagnosis. The one who's tried everything, including everything on your shelf, and is still suffering.
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Sometimes all it takes is two or three different questions asked in a slightly different way to start hearing what the history's been trying to say all along. Sometimes it goes deeper than that, but you need a partner fluent in this illness that's so often undertreated and misunderstood.
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You also have patients with accurate migraine diagnoses and they're finding genuine relief from medication. That's a real and important step. But it's not the end of the road. It's the beginning of a different conversation.
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Once the acute crisis is under control there's so much more to explore. And you ask versions of these questions already. The migraine lens changes what the answers mean. What are they actually eating, not just what they think they're eating. What are they reaching for when they're in the middle of an attack? That matters more than we often assume because when we're in crisis we're not clear minded, we're being driven by cravings and brain fog.
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What supplements are they actually taking consistently, not just the ones they remember once a week. And were those supplements chosen for a migraine brain, or just a generally healthy one? Because we aren't just talking about putting them on magnesium and riboflavin and calling it good. There are migraine-specific regimens that are overlooked and barely known, where the form, the dose, and the timing all matter, and where the right answer still has to be matched to the specific body in front of us.
Both layers have to be accounted for. Even sleep support looks different here. Some of the go-to sleep supplements serve a person with migraine beautifully and some quietly work against them. What does their sleep really look like, and how does it change around an attack? What's their stress history been across their entire lifetime? What did their gut look like ten years before the first migraine ever appeared? Did they have tympanostomy surgery as a child, how many times and why? That's a pattern I keep chasing in my own work, whether repeated early middle-ear inflammation marks the start of an over-sensitized trigeminal system. The literature hasn't caught up to the question yet.
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We find those answers and we don't stop. We take that data and apply healing modalities that speak directly to what we found, approaches that work alongside medication or independent of it, offering a different kind of relief that's built around the specific body in front of us, not a generalized protocol designed for the masses.
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Peeling back these layers is where the real picture emerges. Not a cure. Not a promise. But a genuine path toward understanding why the migraines started in the first place and what healing, on their terms, could actually look like.
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Sometimes the most valuable thing is a fresh perspective from someone who thinks about migraine differently than anyone else in the room. Not because of a system or a protocol. Because of decades of living inside a complex neurological condition, board certification in functional nutrition, and a way of connecting dots that most practitioners weren't trained to see.
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I work alongside your care plan, not around it. Your protocol stays yours. What I bring is the migraine layer, and the fluency to know which thread to pull next.
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If you have a patient whose migraine picture doesn't add up, whose history feels like it's hiding something, or whose standard treatment isn't telling the whole story, bring it to the table. We'll think through it together.
To The Migraine Patient Who Has Become Their Own Doctor:
I see you.
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I know what it's like to message your doctor in a panic because the medication isn't working and you can't tell where one migraine ends and another begins. And then to get the devastating ping back that says it's after 3pm and someone will get back to you tomorrow.
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I know what it's like to become fluent in your own condition out of pure survival. You're forced to know the terminology, the phases, the triggers, the medications and their side effects, because you're fighting for just one normal day. You're clawing your way up a foggy mountain in pain, disoriented. And at the bottom of that mountain, a whole life keeps asking for you anyway. Work, family, everything that doesn't pause just because your head did.
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You are not alone and you shouldn't have to be your own doctor. You should be cared for. Listened to. Given real options.
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And the fluency you were forced to learn? Bring it with you. The notes, the tracking apps, the binder, the mental spreadsheet of everything you've already tried. I know you've sat across from providers who bristled at all that knowledge. I won't. It isn't a burden to me, it's data, and it means we don't start from zero. We start from everything you already know.
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I'm not here to tell you what your migraine feels like. I would never do that. What I'm here to tell you is that there is more to the picture than what you've been shown.
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That the why behind your migraines matters. That understanding it might not fix everything overnight but it might bring just a little more calm, a little more peace, a little more space between the pain and the haze.
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You have been fighting long enough. This part doesn't have to be a fight. Let it be the part where something finally gets quieter.
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When you're ready, this is where we start.
Speaking and Podcasts
​Migraine affects more than one billion people worldwide. It is under-treated, misunderstood, and almost universally approached the same way. Amanda brings a perspective that is genuinely different. Not because she studied it from the outside. Because she has lived it from the inside for decades, pursued board certification to build the science around it, and now works to give other practitioners the map she never had.
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She is available for podcast interviews, conference presentations, practitioner summits, integrative health panels, and women's health focused events.
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Topics Amanda speaks on:
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Her own story: Over a decade of hemiplegic migraine left untreated, prescription after prescription, and then a rare diagnosis with chemotherapy on the table. How she rebuilt her health while her scans kept improving, until her oncologist agreed to monitor instead of treat. What she actually changed, what she can and can't claim about why it worked, and why she then pursued board certification.
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The nervous system, cortisol, and the childhood history nobody is asking about. How to gather and use a patient history the way it was never taught in training, and what that information reveals about the path to healing.
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Healing versus curing, setting realistic expectations, and understanding what quality of life actually means to each individual patient rather than imposing a standard that was never theirs.
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The invisible sugar load, nutrient depletion, and why standard dietary advice in migraine care is incomplete.
Who she speaks to:
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Health and wellness podcast hosts. Functional medicine and integrative health practitioners. Women's health summits and conferences. Nutritionists, health coaches, and allied health professionals seeking continuing education.​
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Logistics:
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Based in Charlotte, NC. Available for virtual events, live or recorded. Travels for keynotes and select events.
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Booking and inquiries:
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Currently accepting podcast and speaking inquiries. Keynote availability begins January 2027.
Board Certified Doctor of Functional Nutrition | Certified Reiki & Shamanic Healing Practitioner
The Book
Sick of Being Sick is in progress.
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It is deeply personal and clinically grounded. It connects dots that are almost never connected in migraine care. It traces the experience of living inside a body that was sending signals nobody knew how to read, and what happened when someone finally did.
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It is for the person who has stopped believing there is a way through. Who can't remember the last day their body felt quiet. Who has been told to accept this as their quality of life.
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It is being written on the same conviction everything else here is built on. That healing and curing are not the same thing, and that understanding the difference changes everything. It isn't finished yet. That's why the door is open now.
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Get a sneak peek by clicking below to read an excerpt from the upcoming book and subscribe to Migraine Unread to follow along as it unfolds.
Migraine is one of the most complex and least understood neurological conditions in clinical practice. Whether it is lifelong, late onset, or shifting in ways that defy existing protocols, there is almost always more to the picture. There is no checklist here, no generic protocol to hand off. Just a deeply researched, whole body approach to the individual behind the migraine.
Because when we look at the full picture, people don't just get fewer bad days. They get their lives back.
It Goes Beyond Words...
For most of my life I did what so many women do. I pushed through symptoms, ignored my own instincts, and told everyone I was fine while my body was begging for help. I lived in survival mode without realizing it. Eventually everything caught up with me and my body fell apart in ways I couldn't ignore any longer.
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What followed was years of frustration, fear, and being dismissed. But also the beginning of something bigger. I started asking different questions. I began listening instead of fighting. Bit by bit, things began to mend.
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Now I get to be fully present for my grandson. I get to show my adult children that age does not dictate what we can still accomplish. There is always light on the other side of a very long dark tunnel.
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That journey is the heart of everything I build here.
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