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.
An excerpt from my upcoming book Sick Of Being Sick
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I roll over and stretch. I am a stomach sleeper and my neck has paid the price over the years.
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Within the first thirty seconds of being awake, the audit begins.
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How much does my head hurt this morning? Is there a twinge over my right eye? Is it blurry? It’s not headache pain, it’s an almost indescribable, unique to me code that my body starts to whisper. The sensation connects my ear and eye together and as my eye moves around in my head it’s like a string being pulled, tightening and then knotting up, creating tension where there shouldn’t be any.
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Breathe in, deep from your toes, at least six seconds, hold it, hold on to it, push oxygen to your brain, let it feed your senses, let it wake up your nerves and nourish them. Push it out slow and deliberate, keep pushing all the stale air out of your head, the air is not gone until you have no breath left. Repeat twice more. It is not what you think it is.
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Am I nauseous? A specific kind of nausea, not the food poisoning kind, a little closer to being on a boat, because when I roll to my back I’m triggered, which also means my balance will be in question. The nausea tells me that the ocean inside my inner ear and cerebellum, where balance is regulated, is sloshing around, waves slamming side to side, pulling those strings that connect my ears and eyes and wreaking havoc. This sends up a flare to my stomach that something is off. Typically it’s not bad enough to vomit but instead just annoying enough to linger for days.
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Why am I nauseous? Did I eat something bad? No. Is there any other possibility that could be causing this sudden feeling of nausea? Maybe. What could it be?
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If the nausea is absent and the eye and ear are quiet, it’s probably just pressure from my neck. But neck pressure doesn’t clear me either. Top of the head pressure is typically cured with a cup of morning coffee, but neck pain is another story so I have to be mindful. Am I grabbing at my neck, trying to rub away a stiff, rock-like feeling, a knot that has no pressure point and will not simply be massaged away?
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Tilt your head back and crack your neck, it will clear the pain. I must have done something during my workout. I also lifted the corner of the couch yesterday. Yes, that must be why it hurts.
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My right thigh tingles and aches deep inside the bone, sometimes combined with muscle twitches that bubble up and down my leg. And by the way, that is not a sign of a migraine. Nope, no one on earth gets that, so I can rule it out. Right? Except wait, it happens almost every time.
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Along with my thigh, my right arm feels sleepy, weak and uncomfortable, as though I slept on it funny, so I shake it gently, opening and closing my fist.
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Damn it. I am opening and closing my hand. That is not good. I refuse to let this be my story today. I am safe in my body and my energy ends at my skin.
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I say this because it helps. If it is anxiety induced then I can soothe my body by reassuring it that I am safe and I don’t have to be sick today. But these days it’s something else, because the anxiety induced ones are few and far between. I know how to manage them now and I know myself and my body so much more intimately. But I still get so annoyed.
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The other biggest signs for me are what I like to call blender head, tin foil teeth and light blocking. I use these terms because that’s how it feels. Calling blender head a cognitive fog doesn’t give you the graphic description of what I am actually experiencing inside my body. It’s literally like someone turns a blender on inside my brain and my thoughts are jumbled but moving at high speed. It’s maddening and disorienting to say the least.
The Morning Migraine Audit
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.
For Practitioners.
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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Sign up for Migraine Unread.
