Tracey Coleman

Migraine frequency dropped 41% in one clinical trial. But the reason why changes everything you think you know about your pain. 👉

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I missed my son's graduation dinner because my body locked up in the church parking lot and I could not get out of the car. Keisha had to come find me. My own daughter, still in her scrubs from her shift, walking across that lot in the heat, opening my door, looking at me the way she looks at patients on her floor. Not surprised. Not angry. Just tired of watching her mama break down in places where other people celebrate. I sat in that passenger seat with both hands on my knees, waiting for my hips and my neck to release enough to walk inside. By the time I made it to the table they were already cutting the cake. That was the last time I let this body decide what I show up for. I am a clinical pharmacist. Twenty nine years behind the counter. Compounding, counseling, reading every study that lands on my desk before I recommend anything to anyone. Where I come from you do not stop for pain. You clock in. You push through. You keep the house running no matter what your body is doing. My mama worked the cafeteria at the nursing home for twenty two years with the same aching hips and burning shoulders I have now. She never missed a shift. She never complained. She sat in her recliner every night with a heating pad and said some bodies just wear out faster, baby. That is all it is. She passed in 2019 in that recliner. I watched her disappear into it over ten years. And I promised myself I would not follow her. So when my sister started texting me links about magnesium and migraines, I ignored every one. I have seen enough supplement nonsense come through the pharmacy to know how this usually ends. But she kept at it. And the last one she sent was from a journal that sits on my own reference shelf. So I did what I have done for nearly three decades. I pulled the original studies and read them myself. What I found made me angry. Not because the research was weak. Because it was solid. Because I had spent twelve years going to the same doctor who looked at my chart, not at me, prescribed Cymbalta before running a single test, and told me to manage my stress. Twelve years of triptans that stopped working. Beta blockers that made my legs feel like bags of sand. Botox injections every three months at $600 a round just to dull the edge for maybe six weeks. And nobody ever asked the one question that changed everything for me. Why does your nervous system keep sending pain signals when there is nothing wrong? That question pulled me out of the migraine research and dropped me into something I was not prepared for. Central sensitization. A state where the nervous system gets stuck in emergency mode. Where normal touch registers as pain. Where a weather shift, a skipped meal, a stressful phone call is enough to set off a full attack because the system that filters real danger from background noise has stopped doing its job. I read those findings three times. Because they were not just describing my migraines. They were describing everything. The burning across my shoulders that no scan ever explained. The weeks where my hips flared so badly I could not stand behind the counter for a full shift. The brain fog my doctor called stress. The mornings where my hands were so stiff I could barely open the same pill bottles I fill for other people every day. I had been treating migraines for twelve years. I had been living with fibromyalgia and calling it aging, calling it stress, calling it what Mama had. The mechanism behind both is the same. The NMDA receptor gate. When it works correctly, it opens for real danger signals and closes when the threat passes. In central sensitization, that gate stays open. Permanently. Every signal gets amplified. In your head it becomes a migraine. In your muscles it becomes fibromyalgia. In your feet it becomes burning at 2am that wakes you out of the only two hours of decent sleep you got. It is not three conditions. It is one broken gate showing up in different parts of your body. And the mineral that controls whether that gate opens or closes is magnesium. Magnesium physically blocks the NMDA channel when pain signaling should stop. When it is depleted, the gate cannot close. The nervous system stays locked in a state that was only ever meant to last seconds. Then the loop takes over. Chronic pain pushes cortisol up. Elevated cortisol burns through magnesium every night while you sleep. Depleted magnesium keeps the gate jammed open. An open gate generates more pain. More pain drives more cortisol. The cycle feeds itself. Night after night after night. And here is what nobody told me. Women who look like us start with lower baseline magnesium levels. The research has documented this. The standard serum test was never designed to catch it. Serum measures the one percent of your magnesium floating in your blood. Ninety nine percent is stored inside your cells. Your blood can read perfectly normal while your cells are running on nothing. Every lab I ever had came back fine. My cells were depleted the entire time. And no one thought to look deeper. That is when I walked to my medicine cabinet. I had tried magnesium before. Three bottles over the years. Not one of them did anything. I picked up the first and flipped it over. Magnesium oxide. The second. Magnesium oxide. The third one said bisglycinate on the front. I read the supplement facts on the back. Primary source: magnesium oxide. A trace of bisglycinate added so they could put it on the label. Then I remembered something that made my chest tight. I had bought Mama the same kind of bottle. From the grocery store. Oxide. Because it was the cheapest and I did not know any better. A pharmacist and I did not know. She took it every night for the last three years of her life and it did nothing for her either. Oxide absorbs at roughly four percent. You swallow 400mg and your body gets maybe 16. Bisglycinate absorbs at eighty to ninety percent. The glycine molecule carries it through the intestinal wall intact. And glycine itself is an inhibitory neurotransmitter that acts directly on NMDA receptors. The form does the work. And the dose has to be real. Mama did not fail magnesium. I did not fail magnesium. The products failed both of us. I spent two weeks researching bisglycinate options. Most dosed at 100 or 200mg. Some mixed oxide in and trusted that nobody would flip the bottle. One company made a pure bisglycinate gummy at the full 400mg clinical dose. Zero oxide. Third party tested. GMP certified. Celuvida. They guaranteed it for 90 days. Ninety days because that is how long it takes to break the cortisol loop and rebuild the magnesium inside your cells to the level where the nervous system starts resetting. I am a pharmacist. I understand timelines. I started. The first week, my sleep shifted. Not dramatically. But the 2am jolts where my jaw was clenched and my shoulders were locked against the pillow started spreading out. By week two, a migraine started building after a double shift. I braced for the usual forty eight hour spiral. It peaked at maybe a four. Then it dissolved. No spiral. No dark bedroom. No cancelled plans. By week four, something I was not expecting. The burning in my shoulders that I had written off as Mama's inheritance started loosening. My hands were not stiff in the mornings. I could stand for a full shift without my hips screaming by mid afternoon. The migraines were never a separate problem. They were the loudest alarm from a nervous system stuck in overdrive for over a decade. When the gate started closing, everything quieted. Not just the headaches. Everything. Week six. Keisha was at the house for Sunday dinner. I stood up from the couch to go fix her a plate. She stopped mid sentence and stared at me. I said what. She said Mama you just got up without making the sound. I said what sound. She said the sound you make every time you stand up. You did not make it. I had no idea I made a sound. That is what central sensitization does. The pain becomes so constant you stop hearing it yourself. The people who love you hear it every single time. By the end of three months, I was not cured. I owe you that honesty. But I went from three to four debilitating migraines a week and a body that felt like it was sealed in concrete to maybe one mild headache a month and joints that moved the way they are supposed to. My doctor noticed before I said a word. When I walked him through the NMDA research and the cortisol loop, he nodded. He said he wished the standard lab panel measured intracellular magnesium instead of serum. I thought about saying where was that curiosity twelve years ago when I was sitting in your office asking for help. But I kept that to myself. Last month Keisha graduated from her BSN program. I was there for every single minute. The ceremony. The dinner. The dancing. I was still on my feet when they started stacking chairs at 11pm. Grandma would have loved this. I am 54 years old. Central sensitization is still part of my biology. But it no longer runs my schedule, my body, or my family. If you have been treating your migraines for years and nothing holds, if your body hurts in ways your doctor cannot explain, if your labs come back normal and you are told to manage your stress, I understand. It was never just migraines. It was never just stress. It was never just what getting old feels like. The gate is open. The loop is running. And the form of magnesium sitting in your cabinet right now is almost certainly not the one that can close it. Flip the bottle. Read the back. If it says oxide, that is the same bottle I bought my mama. Celuvida is the only product I will put my name and my twenty nine years behind. Pure bisglycinate. 400mg. Zero oxide. There is a five minute read that explains the full mechanism, the cortisol loop, and why your blood work keeps missing it. It is the article I wish someone had handed me before I lost Mama to that recliner.