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Comment by markx2 | Hacker News Reader

After decades of migraines I was diagnosed with Chronic Daily Migraines. I was prescribed a 'under the tongue' triptan which if the migraine aura arrived during the day worked some of the time. If I woke with the migraine at 10/10 pain level than I lost the full day.

One of my daughters also had weekly migraines, lost a day at work each time.

I got a Daith piercing in my right ear - my migraines originated on the right side of my head. Yes the piercing stung, but the next day I had no migraine. The constant pain had just stopped. This was maybe 7-8 years ago. I very rarely get odd migraine symptoms - vision feels off, head feels woolly - but no pain at all.

I convinced my daughter to have a Daith. She now doesn't even get regular headaches.

Anecdotal though this is, I would suggest looking into getting this piercing. It is discreet. There is no formal research I am aware of but for this sample of two it was a huge positive.

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I could see that affecting the trapezius muscle or nerve endings somehow. That seems to play a large role in many of my migraines. It probably does for others as it’s part of where the botox for migraine shots go.

Ie when the pain shoots up through/along the side of the traps, along the backside of the ear, to the forehead and back of the eye.

Reminds me of pinching the ear lobes during a migraine. That seemed to sort of help but not terribly.

Nowadays nurtec/the cgrp protein inhibitors work wonders. But I’ll consider the piercings too.

Did you get the piercing because you expected it might help (and if that's the case, would you mind sharing why), or did you get the piercing just for aesthetics and then discovered it helped?

I'm not looking to pick apart your story, just curious.

I got the piercing after reading something somewhere that a daith had helped someone else. I am no stranger to bodyart / piercings and I have a passing interest / experience in acupuncture / acupressure. So the idea it could help appeared worth a shot, so I went for it. I did not think "this will work", but hey, nothing ventured ..

I would not describe a daith as an aesthetic piercing. It is very discreet so not a 'showing off' type. The placement also does not lend itself to changing the usual steel ball closure ring which is initially placed. I did not think through what I would do if it did not work because I am visibily modified and this extra was a nothing.

My daughter has no bodyart. Standard ear-gun piercing, one in each ear. She took some convincing, but all I could say was "This worked for me, I'll pay, there is nothing to lose and much to gain". And it worked.

What I do not know is "If I removed the metal, would I get migraines back?" and I'm not about to try.

Here is something to try: My late wife would have bad headaches. If I squeezed the web between her big toe and the next one the pain would fade after a few minutes and if I continued the pain would stop.

Wow pretty amazing. This seems to point very clearly to a muscle tension issue. The piercing into some area on your head may have helped some chronic tension to release, stopping the migraines.

I was diagnosed with cluster migraines, but I'm not convinced at that diagnosis, it didn't seem that severe. I used to get a migraine or two a month, and in allergy season it was even worse. My migraine were pure pain, I would literally think I was going to die, but I also knew I had been through it enough times that I would be okay. I'd also get full on allergy attacks (relevant in a minute), constant nose running - I'd stuff my nose with toilet paper and sit miserably, unable to focus or think clearly.

Then I moved to another state, and haven't had an allergy attack since, and my migraines have mostly gone away. I get probably one real migraine a year, with smaller headaches maybe once a month. Nothing debilitating like before though. For me I think it was all allergy related, but specific allergies. The state I moved to is rated as having the same allergy levels, but yet I don't have these attacks or as many migraines anymore.

I had a monthly or quarterly migraine for years before getting some wisdom teeth pulled. Now it is almost never.

Could be an effective placebo for sure: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/can-unconventional-pierci...

If it's effective, does it matter if it's placebo?

Especially given low cost and low risk.

As I said, there is no research.

But there is also much anecdotal evidence it helps.

This is one of those areas where anecdotes can be quite valuable, because there seems to be no real downside risk to a piercing aside from the money spent and possible infection, but if there's even a .01% chance it could stop debilitating chronic pain, then sure, you might make a valid decision to try it even though there isn't a study supporting it.

I tend to think in medical science that often anecdotes come first, then the "real" science. Not always populist anecdotes / wive's tales / etc, often times they come from nurses, doctors, or researchers of all kinds -- but sometimes they do come from sparse clusters of common folk sharing anecdotes with each other. Most do not pan out.

But the "hard" science generally needs a spark of intuition to help someone decide "maybe I should look into this", whether it's naive citizens positing that a certain practice/diet/supplement seems to help one of their conditions, or doctors noticing a pattern with a handful of their own cases, or researchers noticing something interesting but unexpected in vitro.

Again, most of these anecdotes don't pan out, but many do, and still today often against best-practice medical wisdom for systems we know less about.

The human body is massively complicated, and we're still just dipping our toes in a lot of new frontiers, and there are some areas which are very difficult to formally study.

The hard science is also limited when you consider the differences in each person. There’s a good article about that: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/09/what-statistic...

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