FDA approves new treatment for adults with migraine
fda.gov
fda.gov
That has lead to me avoiding all medicines every time I get a headache (yes, I understand correlation is not causation).
My primary route to solve any headache is hydration. Adding electrolytes is also important because too much water without them can also give you a headache.
My experience has also lead me to focus on consuming the healthiest diet I can find (currently intermittent fasting + keto with intermittent-vegan weeks, mostly organic, with all nutrients from food sources).
On the other hand, my mother, who could convince the majority she's healthy based on her weight and latest diet buzzwords, has had migraines for the past 30 years, maybe longer — even landing her in the hospital on many occasions.
A migraine is your body telling you something is wrong with your most valuable asset.
Are you sure you want to sweep this problem under the rug?
There is a documentary on Amazon called "Fat". It illustrates how many children with epilepsy were harmed by the combination of 1. lack of understanding food and 2. pharmaceuticals with side effects that render them permanently disabled.
Good luck with your search for health and wellbeing.
So if you have migraines, it is not normal. It is not incurable either. Use pain killers when you must, but keep looking for a solution.
The solution can be different for everybody. Start with diet, it's a very common cause for it. Don't limit yourself to what you think is right. Try things, even weird ones. Took me 3 decades of trials and errors to not need pain killers.
OTC pain killers (and even prescribed pain killers) don't really do anything for the 3 people I know that get migraines. These people have to lay down under their sheets to block all sun light, they can not do absolutely anything at all during the episode but block sunlight and hope whatever medicine sort of worked last time will work this time.
Preaching and generalizing from your mild case helps no one.
Unfortunately, I don't think people understand how long it takes to get a grasp on everything we ingest. Someone in a sibling comment mentioned giving up after just a few months of "logging" their diet.
It took me years to narrow down an allergy/sensitivity to tannins. And it also took years to recognize the full extent of sugars' effect on my body.
Besides, you might be confusing correlation with causation a bit? My sister and mother probably eat healthier than I do and still get disabling migraines sometimes. My diet is "basically whatever, just no animal parts and not too much junk food" and I've never gotten one.
Lucky for you it seems you haven't been exposed to pain killer addiction and death.
But, not as lucky since you don't have someone that can create delicious meals from any ingredients (it's possible, see the TV show "Chopped").
> probably eats healthier
This would be much easier to answer if you spent 1% of the time you spend eating on learning about what it is that's going into your body.
Not saying you are quack, these days reading things like this sets off an alarm for me. I've learned all too-well by my years of dealings with "health-conscious self-help" community that a lot of it is just step away from medical quackery. I suspect the reason for this is D-K effect in people who think that by reading up things in internet they can somehow out-do existing research in the field. I know a person with masters degree in CS who managed to convince himself through the reading of wikipedia and "self-help" books that he was feeling bad due to levels of acidy in his body, condition which he "keeps under control" by drinking bottle of vinegar a day. That was weird, but nothing bad (I believe?), but over few months he became extremely preachy about modern medicine is a scam developed to sell people pills, and it's all solvable by diet and healthy living.
We don't know what causes migraines, and the subject is very hard to research because no there are no apparent differences in anatomy and bio-chemistry between people who suffer migraines and those who don't, and you would need to run tests on sufferer during migraine as it leaves no trace in the body few hours after it ends.
There been many leads that turned out as flukes over the years. Maybe it's something with hormones? Nope. Maybe its blood circulation in the brain? Nope. Pressure on blood vessels in the neck? Nope. Latest discovery is different levels of calcium in brain-spinal fluid in those that suffer migraines and those who don't... so naturally migrainers on Facebookgroups are now all the rage about removing salt from your diet (oh, but this from the top of the mountain salt ten times the price is good for you!).
The problem for migraines today is that anything stronger than caffeine starts to come with potentially nasty side effects. Imitrex is the first option people usually go to - for myself, I decided not to do that.
Almost everyone with migraines will be advised by their doctor to try to identify triggers, dietary or environmental. But it's tricky. I kept a food log for months to absolutely no avail. At some point after about 20 years of migraines, I finally figured out that looking at a really bright light (think sunlight reflection off of polished metal) would pretty reliably trigger a migraine. The existence of medications that reduced the severity of symptoms in no way stopped me or many others from trying to identify causes.
Seems like pain is an indicator that something is wrong to me.
I can’t imagine how awful it is for folks who have no respite and hope this treatment can provide some relief.
One summer in college for a month I got a cluster headache every morning. 20 minutes of absolute agony that made migraines seem like a walk in the park. Thankfully those never came back.
I am glad research has been finding more ways to treat and even stop them.
I also started getting mine in high school (sophomore or junior year, I think?). Never had them frequently, just once or twice a year, which is plenty. I too have noticed a shift in their effect as I get older, away from my predictable blind-spots-followed-by-pain to a wider variety of visual effects and usually just feeling really weird and "off" for the rest of the day.
Oddest one so far involved fairly bad tunnel vision, which was new and I've not had again since, plus the usually just-off-center-of-vision blind spot I get, followed about a half hour later by needing to sleep. It wasn't the same feeling as being very tired, exactly, but I just needed to get in bed and go to sleep. No pain, just that. So weird.
Once I have a migraine, travel is exceedingly difficult for me.
self injection is an option, apparently.
Basically it just sucked. Especially sitting in the bright waiting room, sweating bullets, trying not to throw up before I was seen. My most serious migraines can last a couple of days, and are just awful. Making it go away almost instantly was alway worth the hour or so of additional suffering to get a shot. I’ve also got a rather high pain tolerance, and tend to only get worn down by pain that lasts a long time.
I don’t know if it would be as effective for anybody else, but if you get migraines that seem worse than death, I’d recommend asking your doctor about it.
Please vaporize or use it sublingually - it may change everything.
I don’t think there’s any limit to how proficient you can get at it. I think about that Vietnamese monk who set himself on fire and managed to calmly sit through burning to death, there’s no way anybody could do that without having total control over their pain response. I’ve obviously never experienced anything that traumatic, but I have been in situations where I felt the symptoms of shock setting in and managed to calm myself down enough to get on with things.
I will ask, though.
Migraine abortives like triptans and migraine inhibitors like these CGRP antagonists (erenumab and now ubrogepant) are not painkillers. They attempt to stop the migraine, not just numb the pain. They're both in a league of their own.
https://www.evaluate.com/vantage/articles/news/snippets/ubre...
1) Even if only 10% of people respond, this is likely going to give thousands of people for whom nothing else works a drug that actually does something.
2) Nearly all existing migraine meds fall into the "triptan" class of drugs. This is an entirely new class (CGRP antagonist), and may pave the way to new treatments even if this specific iteration isn't as effective as future ones.
I tried preventative medications but the cure seemed worse than the disease. One, Topiramate, made me forget things and lose my train of thought. No thank you.
I also tried keto for a while and noticed that I hardly had any migraines while on it.
There are a lot of options available now. If you suffer from migraines, go talk to a neurologist with current knowledge, not something they learned 30 years ago.
(Venlafaxine on the other hand is like a shock collar wrapped tightly around your brain waiting for you to miss a dose by even two hours, after which it’ll punish you for the next twenty four hours with electric shocks and spasms in your freaking brain. It’s a real pity it actually kind of worked :/ I still don’t know if I would ever do it again.)
Before I had this medicine the whole day would've been ruined, and I would be very inefficient and lazy tomorrow as well. While I don't get migraine that often, it makes a world of difference when I do get them.
But yes, they do sometimes work and when they do it's relatively long term compared to regular triptan use. And allegedly they're much more potent, especially when it comes to aborting migraines. Some non-hallucinogenic chemical variants are being also researched, both of psilocybin and LSD. LSA has also shown effectiveness sometimes.
At least 3 phase 1/2B-style RCTs of hallucinogens are under way. (Finding working doses, schedules, cataloguing side effects.) Expect results of one for psilocybin mid 2020. There's also long running RCT of LSD, finishing in 2023. I think both of these are for cluster headaches rather than migraines, but close enough.
Pilot trials have been done a long time ago by MAPS, with success. Now it's time for bigger science.
The link is also somewhat interestingly tenuous with ECT and seizures. (In that migraines and seizures rarely coexist, but share symptoms in some cases.)
> It is a small-molecule calcitonin gene-related peptide receptor antagonist