This is how I came to NCR, or how NCR came to me: As a child I was always very active - often out playing in the woods, exploring and climbing trees. In school I was very athletic and played a lot of sports. I rarely was sick, hardly ever catching a cold and never having headaches. After I graduated from high school, I went to Boston University to study. Somewhere in that first year I began to notice that I was having tightness in my head on occasion. I attributed it to late nights and lack of sleep. Along the way, this tightness in my head turned into horrible pain that centered behind the right eye and throbbed so badly it felt like my eye would just fall right out of its socket. Over the years, more symptoms developed: I would know one of these headaches was coming on because light would crackle in my field of vision. Then waves of nausea would crash over me - I would have to go home and lie down in the dark. Sometimes I would vomit. The next day, it would feel like I had a “hangover”: there would be exhaustion, brain fog, apathy. I was diagnosed with migraine headaches at some point, yet nothing helped them. This went on for the 6 years I was at BU obtaining my bachelor’s and master’s degrees.           

I moved to Seattle in the summer of 2003 to go to Bastyr University and study medicine. I was still suffering from migraines on a sporadic basis - they could never be predicted, but came at the most inopportune times. In those first couple of months, I met a wonderful woman named Hillary Lampers who just happened to be the assistant to Dr. Dean Howell (the creator of NCR) for almost ten years. Hillary listened to my story, looked at me and said, “Well, have I got the thing for you”. She told me all about NeuroCranial Restructuring, which I had never heard of before, and she told me how it had helped her. At this point, I was so sick of these migraines and had tried so many other things that I needed very little persuasion - I set up an appointment with Dr. Howell (who happened to practice outside of Seattle) as quickly as I could. We saw each other in the fall of 2004 and I received my first NCR series. Immediately I saw that I was standing up straighter and that my feet were squarely on the ground - I felt stronger, more stable and more balanced. I also had a surplus of energy during treatment. Dr. Howell explained this was common: some people get very energetic during treatment, others get quite tired. Anyway, the months passed after that treatment, and no migraines occurred. I was ecstatic. I got more treatment because I noticed that certain things about my posture or structure were off and I wanted them optimized. Still no migraines. NCR became the motivating factor for my medical education - I wanted to bring this therapy to the people. It had such potential to alleviate so much pain. I began practicing on myself and studying in depth the mechanisms of pain. I shadowed a doctor specializing in sports medicine. My focus was on structure and pain: how to best optimize structure, how structure goes “wrong” and how to attack and eliminate the many aspects of pain. The years passed and I had a few headaches but still no migraines. Hillary became a dear friend of mine.           

After graduating from Bastyr, I signed up immediately for the NCR doctors certification class given by Dr. Howell. It was an intense process and I became certified in September of 2007. Since then, I have been conducting NCR series twice monthly, eager to bring this therapy to all who need it. And I still have not had a migraine. What about you? Tell me your story.