Florus Relief ad: Don't Buy Florus Until You've Read This

Please don't buy this little roll-on from Florus. I was told I had cervicogenic headache and chronic trapezius tension for 11 years. Here's what happened when I used this for 30 days. I'm Mary Alvarez. I've been a dental hygienist for 18 years. I've worked at the same practice in Albuquerque since 2008. I position between 15 and 25 heads a day at specific angles to clean teeth that cannot be cleaned at any other angle. I know jaw anatomy. I know neck anatomy. I know the suboccipital triangle at the base of the skull: the four tiny muscles between the top of your neck and the base of your head, because I feel it every time I lift a patient's head to re-angle it for the lower back molars. Eleven years ago I sat in an exam room in a pain management clinic and heard my own pain management specialist say the same words I had been given by three doctors before him. This is cervicogenic headache. Degenerative changes at C5-C6. Chronic myofascial trap tension. We'll start conservative. If injections don't hold, we'll talk about radiofrequency ablation. He handed me a folder. Procedure cost estimates. Post-ablation instructions. The folder has been sitting on my own kitchen counter for 11 years. I couldn't do it. Not yet. I've spent 18 years positioning patients' heads at angles that respect their cervical limitations. I know what the trajectory looks like after an ablation. The nerve grows back in 9 to 12 months and you repeat it. Each repeat is a smaller window of relief. By the eighth or ninth year you've burned the same nerves a dozen times and the pain comes back the way it always came back and you have no cervical structure left to work with. I teach patients how to protect their necks. I wasn't ready to burn mine. A patient of mine came in for a cleaning this past June. She was a neurologist, one I hadn't met before, she was new to town and we got to talking about my own neck during her exam. She asked me three questions. Was there light sensitivity on my bad days? Yes. Was there nausea? Sometimes, in the afternoon. Was the pain always on the same side? Yes. Right. She looked at me from the chair. She was supine, mouth open, I had my hands in her face. She said, "Mary. That isn't cervicogenic. That's migraine driving your trapezius." I didn't know how to answer. I kept scaling. She asked for my email as she was leaving. She sent me a link that night to a topical formula developed by another neurologist named Dr. Fiora Laurent. She wrote: "The muscle is downstream. The nerve is upstream. Try this at the first base-of-skull pressure, before the pain even starts. The nerve sits two millimeters under the skin." I ordered it that same night. Not because I believed her. I'd been told to try something new every two years for a decade. Because the ablation folder was still on the counter and I needed something between me and that folder. Day 1. The bottle arrived on Tuesday. I applied it before bed, at the base of my skull. The cooling reached somewhere deeper than skin within 90 seconds. I didn't say anything to my husband. Day 3. I woke up on Thursday and didn't do the roll-and-brace to get out of bed. The thing I teach every patient over 50 to do to protect their cervical spine. I did it wrong, the normal way, sat straight up, and nothing happened. I sat on the edge of the bed for a full minute waiting for the base-of-skull clamp to tighten. It didn't. Day 5. I turned my head to the right in the car to check my blind spot. Just turned my head. Not rotated my whole torso the way I had been for seven years. I was in the parking lot at my practice. I pulled over and sat there for ten minutes. Day 7. I positioned 18 patients that day. I did not need to press my thumb into the right side of my SCM between patients to break up the clamp. I noticed at 4 p.m. that my scrubs weren't damp from pressing a hot compress to my neck under the fabric all day. I had been doing that since 2018 without quite realizing it had become a habit. Day 10. I slept on my left side. I had not slept on my left side since 2020 because the right-sided pain would radiate down into my shoulder and wake me up by 3 a.m. I woke up at 7:15 in the morning on my left side and lay there for a long time. Day 14. I reached up to the top shelf of the sterilization cabinet. The top shelf where we keep the autoclave spare parts. I had been standing on a step stool to reach it since 2019 because reaching above shoulder height would set off a trap spasm. I used my own arm. There was no spasm. The hygienist next to me watched me reach for the box of indicator strips and did not notice I was crying. Day 17. My husband said at dinner, "You look taller." Day 21. I called the pain management clinic and canceled the ablation evaluation appointment I had scheduled for August. The scheduler asked me why. I told her. She was quiet for a long moment and then she said, "Mary. I'm going to need to tell the doctor. Is that okay?" Day 24. My chiropractor, who I had been seeing weekly for nine years, asked me what had changed. I told him. He said, "I don't know what to do with this information yet, but keep doing it." Day 27. I went eight hours between applications and nothing happened. I had forgotten the bottle at home that morning. I noticed at 3 p.m. that I hadn't been bracing my shoulders for the base-of-skull climb the way I had every afternoon for 11 years. Day 30. I went to the dentist for my OWN cleaning. The dental chair tilted back. I had been having my cleanings in a mostly-upright chair for seven years because tilting back triggered the clamp. The hygienist tilted me all the way back. I didn't say anything to stop her. I was still, mouth open, head tilted back for 50 minutes. I had my cleaning. I got up out of the chair without pushing off the arms. I drove home. I sat in the driveway for 20 minutes before I could go inside. Six weeks after I started, I went back to the pain management specialist for a follow-up. He watched me walk in. Watched me sit down. Watched me stand up without pushing off the arms of his chair. He said, "What did you change?" I told him. The topical. The three application points. The nerve. He made a note. Then he said, "Whatever this is, keep doing it. Let's take you off the surgical waiting list for now and reassess in six months." The ablation folder is still sitting on my kitchen counter. Unopened. Eleven years old. I'm furious. I'm furious because I've spent 18 years as a dental hygienist. I have been in the chairs of a chiropractor, two massage therapists, four physical therapists, a pain management specialist, three orthopedists, a neurologist, and a functional medicine doctor. None of them, not one, ever asked me if lights bothered me on my bad days. None of them ever asked me about the nausea. Those two questions would have changed everything. The muscle was downstream. The nerve was upstream. Every pair of hands that worked on my trap for 11 years was releasing a muscle that a nerve 2 millimeters under my skin was going to tighten again as soon as I stood up. Here is what I learned, in named concepts you can carry: THE DOWNSTREAM LIE. Chronic muscle tension in the trapezius, SCM, suboccipital triangle, and levator scapulae is often, not always, but often, being driven by trigeminal nerve activation at the brainstem through a structure called the trigeminocervical complex. The muscle contracts because the nerve is telling it to. Not because of your posture, not because of your desk job, not because of your pillow. Which means the massage and the chiropractic release the muscle temporarily while the nerve keeps re-firing it. THE LIGHT QUESTION. One question: "Do lights bother you on your bad days?" — distinguishes a cervicogenic/myofascial pattern from a migraine pattern. Light sensitivity and nausea are not muscle patterns. They are nerve patterns. If you have the muscle pattern AND the light pattern, you have migraine driving the muscle pattern. In 11 years, no provider asked me the question. THE 90-SECOND RESET. A topical applied at the three trigeminal surface points: temples, behind the ears, base of the skull, reaches the nerve in about 90 seconds. The nerve stops sending the muscle-contraction signal. The trap releases on its own, in the window the pill has always been 45 minutes late to. So please don't buy this if you don't have the pattern. If your neck pain is a clear structural issue: a herniated disc, true cervical stenosis, post-surgical scar tissue, Florus is probably not the right tool for you. There'll be more for the rest of us. But if you have the neck pain AND the base-of-skull clamp AND the light sensitivity AND the nausea on the bad days AND the headache that always starts at the base of your skull and climbs to your right temple, if you have been told it's cervicogenic for a decade and nothing has held, try this. Give it 30 days. Watch what your trap does when the nerve stops telling it to brace. I went from a tilt-back dental chair I couldn't tolerate for seven years to a 50-minute cleaning in week four. From an ablation folder on my counter to my own pain management specialist taking me off the surgical list. The folder is still unopened. 7,405 five-star reviews from diagnosed migraine sufferers. 90-day money-back guarantee. If it doesn't change what your trap does when you stand up, you pay nothing. - Mary Alvarez Dr. Laurent, the neurologist who built Florus, wrote a short piece on the brand's site walking through the five specific reasons she recommends it for exactly the pattern I had. The trigeminocervical complex, the base-of-skull application point, the muscle-contraction signal. If you have been working with a chiropractor or a physical therapist for years, read it first. It will give you the vocabulary to explain to them what you're trying. 👉 https://florus.com/blogs/news/5-reasons-i-recommend-this-roll-on-to-every-migraine-sufferer P.S. There are cheap peppermint roll-ons on Amazon that look identical to the real Florus bottle. They are synthetic peppermint fragrance oil in a water-based carrier. They do not reach the trigeminal nerve at depth. A hygienist I know bought the Amazon version by accident because the photos looked identical. The bottle smelled nice and did nothing for her base-of-skull clamp. The real Florus is sold only on the official site. The link above is the right one. P.P.S. I keep three bottles. One in my bathroom, one in my scrubs pocket, one in my purse. I'd rather it was still in stock when I need to reorder, so if the pattern I described doesn't match yours, please leave it for someone whose pattern does.