I used to get frequent migraine attacks - there were times when I would be down 3 days in a week, just unable to be productive. A lot of it was induced by stress.
I then tried something novel - I took some LSD. I had an intense psychedelic trip, dug deep into my psyche, realized I was a giant ball of anxiety. The anxiety's root cause was ultimately a fear of mortality (around the same time, my dad was going through a terminal illness, we spent many years in and out of ICUs, so a lot of that had soaked into me). I had to come to terms with my own mortality, which happened when I just "melted" away and lost sense of self momentarily, and once I did, I felt so much lighter as I came out of the trip.
My migraines stopped right then and there; I kid you not. I didn't get a single headache for the next 4-5 years, and in general, I was also a lot more balanced and at peace, even though I went through some highly stressful times. It was miraculous.
Of course, life has a way of creeping up on me, and I do get migraines occasionally, but when I do, I know how to stop them - I just need to slow down, meditate (not feel-good meditations all these meditation apps promote, but actually meditate and feel your muscles relaxing). That single LSD trip taught me how to relax myself physiologically.
Not saying this is going to work for everyone, just sharing my personal experience. Please keep in mind that playing with psychedelics is like playing with fire. Exercise caution.
As a counter-antidote: I know several people now who have experimented with psychedelics with the goal of addressing mental health issues who ended up significantly worse.
One of them got stuck with a nagging feeling that the world wasn’t quite real that lasted for a very long time, which resulted in a lot of anxiety.
Depersonalization and derealization are truly awful. Having experienced them for non-psychedelic reasons, it's almost indescribable.
Sometimes people say "seeing events in third person". My experience was that my consciousness and actions were completely disconnected from my observations of reality. Like, I questioned whether I had any influence at all over my existence. Basic, predictable events were suddenly uncertain and terrifying. It left me with no mental capacity to do anything but uneasily exist.
With treatment, it goes away gradually over months. I never want to go back there.
It definitely depends on the person and the state of mind they have when they go into it. I've had really overwhelming de-personalization episodes on LSD as well and they were extremely positive, life transforming experiences. I had studied and practiced Buddhism for years prior to having those experiences, though, which helped me integrate what was happening. It was like all of a sudden getting a direct experience of what was previously just words and philosophy -- "oh, this is what he was talking about."
Had I gone into it totally blind with no way to frame it it probably would have been a nightmarish scenario though. There's a reason why Right View (samyak-drishti) is the first of the 8 Noble Truths [1] and the one really emphasized in the beginning of your Buddhist practice.
One wonders if that's how it actually is and the rest is just the brain fooling us into having control by way of rationalizing the actions we were going to do anyway.
We kinda know its like that dont we. Perhaps those who suffer such condition see throuh the abstractions our brain makes. Like seeing things in a rawer form that doesnt align well with more normative views of society.
Without the lies our brain tells our consciousness, we couldn't function. Even core stuff like the way that we see or our experience of choice, are dependent on our brain fooling us in some way.
Luckily, we an pretty good at being hypocritical. This allows us to learn and think about this stuff while still believing the lies.
I firmly oppose the use of LSD under any circumstances, as it often marks the beginning of self-destruction, no matter how justified the reasons may seem. In my experience, those who have used LSD inevitably see their lives spiral into chaos.
There's something to be said about psychedelics and introversion in general being a two-edged sword. There's also something to be said about how we get into trouble when we consider beliefs or abstract feelings as something outside our control.
Can this family of drugs even give a psychedelic experience at higher doses? They are acting on 5-HT1B and 5-HT1D, not the 5-HT2A receptors that psychedelics act on.
I had a headache that seemed like a cluster headache and I took lsd every week for about 3 years, I'd get 5 days headache free out of 7 - was wonderful.
Then I met a gp who actually helped and mentioned indometacin and because that worked I was diagnosed with chronic parosysmal hemicrania.
PPIs didn't work, so I took ranitidine but eventually my stomach couldn't take the indometacin anymore and I had to stop it - the headaches returned.
Then I had an abcess in my jaw that almost killed me of sepsis and had to have two surgeries on my jaw and spent a month in the hospital on antibiotics. CPH didn't return.
Now I take a mild dose of propranolol daily and I rarely have headaches or migraines.
Stress is definitely a huge migraine trigger for me too, and it's really interesting how that trip helped you get to the root of it. I haven't tried psychedelics, but I can relate to the idea that learning to truly relax (not just surface-level relaxation) can make a big difference
Psychedelic treatment of migraines has nothing to do with the trip, however. Be careful of confusing your feelings with your actual health, they are not always related.
true. the one time i used lsd i had a horrifying bad trip, like a waking nightmare. the kind of bad trip that people die from. but my migraines completely stopped for five years afterwards.
And to respond to the latter, how many people are diagnosed every year with terminal cancer after a routine doctor’s appointment? I didn’t believe I needed an example.
This is where pseudoscience comes from. You dropped acid and think it helped you but you probably tried many different things before acid which "didn't work". In all likelihood the acid had nothing to do with it; it was just a coincidence that your symptoms improved.
Also, it's common to have a lot of migraines for a period in your life and then stop having them. Or sometimes the reverse. I used to get very painful migraines about twice a year. Eventually that stopped. I still get migraines a couple times a year but they're quick "silent migraines" i.e. not painful, just annoying and disorienting.
Possibly, but there are a lot of people that self-administer LSD for migraines who say it helps tremendously. I'm also one of those people. Between occasional LSD and daily magnesium supplementation, my migraines are very infrequent these days.
Are you aware of the ample research and scientific knowledge on the interplay between the 5-HT2A receptor and inflammation, vasomotor effects, and effects of 5-HT2A activation on migraine and cluster headaches?
I disagree, if it stopped it stopped. It could be from something else, but his LSD intake is the most likely candidate. It would become pseudoscience if he or she would claim that this will work for everyone.
Also, don't forget that science can make a similar flaw. Just because a drug works on average, doesn't mean that it will work for you or that it won't have any negative side effects. Human variation can be quite big with certain things.
This is also how many scientific discoveries start. An n=1 observation. Then more observations, then more validation. This is how we ended up getting ketamine for depression.
I had a similar experience but with simple Marijuana.
I was getting migraines every week for months. Specifically my eye would catch light at some strange angle and it would almost burn itself onto my retina (massive light sensitivity). I was also highly stressed at the time.
I was laying in bed with a migraine on a Saturday early afternoon. Smoked some pot (I am not a day smoker, generally pretty sober during the day) and then sat down. I just told myself that this was stupid, I live an incredible life, have a family that loves me and its all self induced and I was done with it. Forced myself to get out of bed and just started moving. Trudged my way through it that day and have not really had a migraine since. This was years ago.
I have occasionally had that initial flash of light that tells me a migraine is coming (always while sitting down to work so I know its stress related). As soon as it hits, I close my eyes and just will it to go away. Has been pretty successful. A couple of times I have had to sit there for 10 minutes for the lens flare (for lack of a better word) to go away. This has happened maybe twice a year for the last ~4 years.
Not saying its self induced / stress for everyone but this worked for me.
I've suffered from migraines all my life. It worsened as I've gotten older. One day long attacks turned into three day long attacks. Then turned into five day long attacks. I've taken various preventatives and abortives over the years to varying success. It runs in my family so I never thought to see a neurologist for them. A couple years ago I had a bad string of them and my medicine wasn't really touching it, so I finally decided to see a headache specialist. The doctor very quickly got me started one of these anti-CGRP medications.
Almost immediately, I dropped to 0-1 attacks a month, and when they do happen they are both less painful and my other medicine knocks them out fast.
My mom had migraine headaches pretty much all her life. For many years she had been seeing the same doctor for her headaches.
Then she got old enough that she was on Medicaid, and she had to stop seeing that doctor because he didn’t accept Medicaid. So she found a different doctor. Different doctor prescribed a different treatment and lo and behold, her headaches pretty much went away after that.
My paternal grandmother was a migraineur, but back in the 1930s she was treated as a "hysterical" woman and given opiates. Her battles could not be overcome and she lived a short life. Thankfully the treatments have evolved.
Yep, I was exactly the same. It took me decades to get diagnosed, then several more years before I saw a neurologist. Now I'm on a CGRP blocker, I hardly get them at all.
In addition, my anxiety/depression is almost gone and my ADHD is about 50% improved (I'm not able to tolerate anti-ADHD meds). I love Nurtec. Expensive, but worth every penny. If my insurance didn't cover it, I'd pay out of pocket without a second thought. It's that good.
I had them in my 20s on a weekly basis but since I could stave them off with massive water intake I thought they were something else. I didn't get optical symptoms, it was just a really bad headache, nausea and chills that felt like a bad hangover. It wasn't until my 40s when I started getting optical migraines (which are scary as hell since they mimic a stroke) that I went to a dr and he diagnosed me. Apparently it's common for migraine sufferers to transition to optical migraines when they're older.
Same pattern for me. About a year ago migraines escalated to a few times a week. Debilitating. I started searching for a solution and discovered this book [1]. It basically recommends a low carb or even a keto diet. After three weeks migrants reduced to once every three to four months, and mostly because I'm cheating on the diet. Life changing.
This is what helped me as well, plus probiotics to turn my gut flora around.
I have a nagging feeling that "migraine" is actually not an actual single disease. It's rather a syndrome, i.e. a set of symptoms people have for various different reasons.
Through keto and the probiotics experimenting, I've learned much more about how the whole gut thing "works" (very much not an exact science!) for myself and that doctors in general are clueless about it themselves. Or ignorant. Or don't want to deal with anything they can't just diagnose with a 5 minute talk.
My migraines are food related. Without the probiotics I could somewhat control when I might get one by not slipping and eating something tasty but bad for me (like lasagna two days in a row - tomatoes bad). Add to this the fact that food in many cases takes two days to go through your system, eating a food and getting symptoms is delayed. Evacuating the food from your system would also cure the acute migraine headaches and other symptoms. With the right probiotics I can now eat all the lasagna I want and throw in blue cheese and red wine as well!
Low carb/keto also had dramatic effects on frequency of migraines/headaches for myself. CPAP however, has been even more life changing in that regard for myself. From headaches 4-7 days of the week to fewer than 1 per week.
Some confounding variables on diet/weight loss/sleep quality. But I don't care, things are better and I'm happier for it.
I've been on Qulipta (a CGRP drug) daily for about a year now. It started working pretty much immediately, and I cannot think of a single side-effect in use, other than that you will have a withdrawal period pretty much immediately if you miss a dose.
Before that I've used Rizatriptan to treat rather than prevent (works well, but can cause brain fog, mood swings and GI issues). In order to get approval for the CGRP I had to try lower-cost drugs like Verapamil (a calcium channel blocker) which had no effects at all, positive or negative, and Topiramate, which is the single worst medication I've ever used. Compared to all of those, the CGRP is a miracle and has been life-changing.
There a some small side-effects with Quilipta. I was a bit low energy for a couple a weeks until my body got used to it. Also, it is a mild appetite suppressant. I seem to be able to miss doses of a day or two just fine though. Nurtec also works well for me as an accute migrate treatment.
I'm on Emgality, and haven't noticed any side effects at all.
Honestly the worst part of it has been getting special approval from insurance; sometimes they don't cover much of it but right now the manufacturer provides a savings card that brings it down to $35/month.
I got my first migraine in my early teens. I was over at a friend's house and we were playing in the basement on a summer day, then went outside where the sun reflected off a window into my eyes.
It would start with a shimmering pattern obstructing my vision where the bright light was, which would grow into a c shape and get bigger until it surrounded my vision and then faded away. About 15 min after the shimmering pattern faded the blistering pain would start and last for about 5 hours, with lingering light sensitivity until the next day.
I later realized that something about a rapid change in brightness (from dark to bright) would trigger them for me.
Another time was triggered by a high school shop teacher lighting a welding torch.
The best way to relieve the pain I found was to turn out all the lights and dunk my head in cold water, which I discovered eventually in desperation for relief.
I would only get them every few months, but when I did I would be pretty useless for most of the day. I stopped getting them in my early 20s. No idea why, but I am grateful. They sucked!
I sometimes get shimmering patterns which I think they call visual migraine or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintillating_scotoma but thankfully mine don't go on to migraine proper. They often seem set of by a bright light outside the center of vision like I'm reading a book with sunlight coming in from 45 degrees.
Exactly the same trigger here. I had one just the other day at the pub. Sitting outside, under shade, but to my left was a bright spot. It’s weird how I can sense it arriving ... something about the quality of my vision subtly changes, and there it is.
Fortunately for me it isn’t accompanied by a headache. It’s just really unsettling. At least now I’ve learned to recognise them and I just try to chill out while it does its thing.
(FWIW, also a tremendous consumer of caffeine here. But this was at 17:00, a good 5 hours after my last cup.)
For whatever it’s worth, too much caffeine and dehydration does this to me. Chugging about 48 oz of water and throwing on a face mask for 30-60 minutes usually clears it up. If I do “nothing” it takes significantly longer to clear up.
In my case it's the combination of too much caffeine, dehydration, and intense exercise where my HR maxes out. 2/3 risk factors will typically not be enough to trigger one for me. HIIT workouts and soccer have done it in the past.
The aura (with scintillating scotoma) starts coming on usually an hour or so after the exercise is done, and I know I've got about 15-20 minutes before the actual migraine hits. Got prescribed Sumatriptan and it maybe reduced the intensity by about 25%. I'll have to try the water chugging, maybe with rehydration salts to speed up absorption.
I get the same, and all of these tend to be a trigger for me too -- too much caffeine, dehydration, and rapid light intensity change (like looking outside and then back to my computer screen).
In addition to chugging water and staying in the dark with a face mask, I've found that taking raw honey right as it's coming on makes it go away rapidly.
My long term prevention is taking magnesium daily and LSD once or so a year. Once I started doing that the frequency went to almost zero, and whenever I don't do that they start up again.
I've been getting scintillating scotoma for over 50 years. They've changed character over the years from widespread fortifications to virtually no scintillation at all but always progress from a bright spot to a large blind spot to an expanding toroidal blind region with vision restored at the origin point until they pass out of my field of vision. They used to lead to headaches and sometimes speech deficits or other somatic experiences (like sizzling on my tongue and lips) but now I just get mild abdominal discomfort. With a couple of notable exceptions it lasts about an hour.
I have learned that while they're inconvenient, they're harmless and I just generally continue with whatever I was doing when they began. I have never been able to discern a trigger: they appear to come on completely randomly.
Exact same story here, including the occasional speech problem. Well, I've only been getting them for 30 years. It's always reassuring to hear this from people who have been getting them for longer than me. They used to freak me out when I was younger. Still worry me a bit when I get multiple in a single week.
I've had fewer than a dozen episodes starting last year. Luckily, like you, I have scintillating scotoma without headache. I haven't noticed a trigger--they're just spontaneous. A couple of years before, I had a couple of episodes of binocular diplopia (https://www.yalemedicine.org/conditions/double-vision). Dunno if they're related.
I used to get these two or three times a year, but then I had heart surgery last summer and had five in the first day after I came round from the anesthetic, and two or three every day for weeks after that. They've now settled down to one every few days. Annoying, but they go away fairly quickly and just leave me feeling a bit tired and headachy for a few hours.
I've mentioned this before in previous HN threads about scintillating scotomas, but it's worth repeating: in my case, the issue was entirely due to excessive caffeine consumption. When I got them frequently I was sometimes consuming upwards of 450mg/day, when I cut intake way down they disappeared entirely, and when I occasionally fall off the wagon and have way too much that's when they come back.
I also discovered the dive / ice water reflex sometimes helped my migraine. The reason I tested it is because caffeine supposedly releases some chemicals related to the same chemicals that are released when you vomit. Since my migraines always ceased after vomiting, I used these other methods to induce the same chemical response in the brain.
I now keep Excedrin migraine on hand (has caffeine). However, my migraines completely ceased after I stopped using nasal steroid spray and started with an allergy nasal spray.
I underwent allergy treatment that stopped working, so I decided to try steroid medication. After about four days, I began experiencing unusual migraines every day. I had migraines before, but they always came with a headache. However, with the steroids, I started getting just very strange optic auras. Everything began to sparkle out of nowhere, becoming more intense until I had to close my eyes. The symptoms stopped once I discontinued the steroid treatment.
I'm glad you shared this - I also have light triggered migraines and I didn't realize there were so many others who also did. :) huh! I take ibuprofen and two shots of espresso and lock myself in a dark room and do deep breathing/relaxation -- the latter seems to have been surprisingly helpful for me in the last few years, and makes me wonder if my anxiety response to having the initial aura was actually contributing to worsening the migraine.
My favorite episode was when I went to my doctor, said "yeah, it's good, I haven't had a migraine for like 6 months", and as part of the physical he shined a pen light in my eyes ... and I went home and developed a migraine. sigh.
(Fortunately, some time in my 20s, I stopped getting the headache part for the most part and now just have aura -- which renders me partly unable to see, alas -- and feeling pretty off for a while.)
There are OTC meds you can buy that are marketed as "migraine relief" that are just acetaminophen + caffeine; my wife takes that and it usually works to relieve the symptoms (if she can catch it early enough).
Of course, then you take away the espresso - there's always a trade-off :)
Have you tried cold brew? It has about 10x the caffeine of an espresso shot. Espresso has the least amount of a caffeine of coffee drinks. Cold water and long exposure extracts more caffeine than hot water and short exposure. Source: I’m a coffee nerd.
The difference isn't typically that vast. At usual dilution levels, drinking a 16oz cold brew would be slight caffeine gain on the double-shot. Heat does extract caffeine better that cold, which is why the shot is prepared in ≈25 seconds and the cold brew concentrate takes 12-20 hours.
Yep, I realized mine were caused by looking out the window while I brushed my teeth in the morning. One day it was really bright outside and really dark inside and the migraine started almost immediately. More than a year and I keep the blinds drawn while I'm in the bathroom in the morning and not a single migraine!
This is interesting. I frequently had them triggered by riding BART in the late afternoons in the winter, sun beating in through the dirty windows. Going through the tube (dark) and emerging in Oakland (raised track, clear view of the sky on both sides) had a double-digit % chance of giving me a migraine if my eyes were open at one point.
I can get them triggered by riding in a car in similar conditions, too, especially if the windows aren't squeaky clean. I frequently wonder why that is, something about the remaining spectrum of visible light when the windows are dirty?
Reminds me of wearing non-prescription sunglasses despite having myopia. It feels like the blurring of the world is due to the glasses, even though they're actually only blocking some of the light rather than distorting it.
Same! My understanding of migraines is that it's something to do with blood pressure in your head. My hypothesis is that the visual disturbances are your blood vessels dilating and pressing against your retina. Then I think it can cause kind of a runaway feedback loop of some sort that causes the blood pressure to increase throughout your head, causing pain.
Thinking about it now, I wonder if the light trigger could be the bright light causing minor damage to your retina, potentially triggering an inflammation/repair response. The fact that it happens when going from dark to light suddenly, also makes sense, since your pupil is at its most dilated when in the dark, meaning the most of your retina is exposed/vulnerable. That might also explain why it always starts in the periphery; because the edges of your retina are likely less often exposed to light and potentially more delicate -- but would be exposed if you see bright lights while your pupils are fully dilated.
For me, I've found it's also closely related to irregular food or sleep. And I find eating something with sugar or drinking some water can reduce the likelihood of the visual disturbances becoming a full-on migraine. My hypothesis is that these things alter your blood chemistry/physics enough to interfere with the runaway feedback loop that results in increasing blood pressure. I imagine dunking your head in cold water likewise works because it breaks the runaway process.
I was around 13 when I had my first migraine. A solid block of pain on the right side of my head. That occasional migraine became more frequent over the years. I had a headache 24/7 in one specific place in my head.
In my early 30's, after blood tests, food elimination, x-rays and finally an MRI I was told that I had Chronic Daily Migraines.
Most days were 6-7/10 pain. Those days that were 10/10 I perfected the art of lying down and breathing in such a way that I barely moved. Noise / light were never an issue, the pain got worse when I moved.
Then I got a daith piercing.
I had read that a daith could help.
I got the daith ~14 years ago and I have not had any sort of headache since. Both my daughters who had migraines got a daith and they too have no headaches.
I get the sample size is not useful, but if you have migraines, go into your local proper piercing studio and ask for a daith - they will almost certainly reply "On which side of your head is the pain?"
I had migraines at least once every two weeks for most of my life. Nothing too out of the ordinary, just that 7/10 dull pain in the center of my head that shut me down for 5 or 6 hours.
I'm very skeptical about supposed instant fixes like this. I didn't expect it to work, but I wanted to start getting ear piercings and I figured I'd give it a shot with something not too flashy. I went with my wife to her piercing appointment and convinced them to pierce my left daith while we were already there.
That was at least seven years ago. I haven't had a migraine since. I keep assuming it's placebo and it'll wear off, but it hasn't.
If this is because of the piercing doig some vagus nerve stimulation, do you think a simple, small clip or something placed in the right position could help as well?
Suffering from the occasional migraine myself (3-4x year) it seems a bit too drastic for myself... but my wife has very frequent migraines, anything that could possibly help is worth investigating
I've heard of this piercing so many times and always wrote it off as some mass hypnosis quick fix that would change nothing. Your comment made me reopen that box I closed years ago. I'm very curious now.
Did you get the piercing on your left or right ear?
> Research says it's no more effective than a placebo, but hey, if it works, it works.
The paper you cited doesn’t say this, if anything it says the opposite. It found that it reliably works for some amount of time, but the mechanism is unclear.
“In all case studies and the retrospective study, patients reported substantial reductions in pain immediately after daith piercing; however, headache symptoms recurred several weeks to months thereafter. From the perspective of the Chinese and Western auricular systems, no sufficient explanation for the described treatment effect of daith piercing was found.”
A piercing that takes months to heal and has its own potential side effects (infection for one) does not seem worth weeks of relief after which pain returns. The authors of this study therefore do not recommend this piercing for migraines despite the transitory benefits
“current evidence does not support daith piercing for the treatment of migraine, tension-type headaches, or other headache disorders.”
I have tried vagus nerve stimulation and it worked for about a week and then became mostly ineffective. That is consistent with this study. So, maybe try vagus nerve stimulation first and see if that works long term.
I'm willing to try it! Are you able to wear earbuds with the daith piercing? Airpods Pro are one of my most-used pieces of tech both at work live-streaming classes and at home listening to books and music.
What about wearing a winter hat? I was considering getting one for the exact reasons as you, but I live in a pretty cold area and not being able to wear a hat for 6 months during its healing process is unfortunately a dealbreaker.
I started having migraines at 8 years of age, several a week. This persisted all through my life till 42 years later, I had a blood pressure emergency where I ended up in ER with 190/100 blood pressure. Thankfully, it never repeated and was never diagnosed but as a consequence I was put on Olmesartan, a blood pressure medication that relaxes the blood vessels. Eventually, the dose was reduced to the lowest, 5mg, once a day, to which I added 240mg magnesium glycinate, which they sell in Costco. I have been mostly migraine free since for several years and ones I do get are mild compared to before.
My cardiologist, who prescribed the blood pressure medication, is mystified saying that while beta blockers are a migraine prevention medication, olmesartan isn't a beta blocker and maybe it was just my (mild) hypertension which needed to be treated. I doubt that I had hypertension when I was 8 but I'm just thankful that decades of pain have come to an end.
Hmm, I was prescribed Verapamil (calcium channel blocker, also a blood pressure medication), and they helped reduce the severity of my migraines with aura for a while. I eventually went off it, and haven't had near as many since. Early twenties was so awful for those migraines.
Did you find Verapamil had any mood altering or cognitive properties for you? I take it for migraines. I think it makes me a little more emotionally stable but a tiny bit slower cognitively, especially in the mornings. It's a good trade off, especially in light of how it basically stopped my migraines, but it's one I have perceived.
Migraines are the absolute worst. On average I would get 6-8 a year. My triggers are primarily not eating frequently enough, bright lights and constant loud sounds. Knowing that, I mostly am able to avoid them and I can usually tell early enough when one is coming on to course correct. I never really explored any medication with my doctor because it was infrequent enough that I didn't really think of it. Then I had the worst migraine of my life. Typically I would vomit some as it starts to get really bad. Usually at that time I'm already laying on the bathroom floor because there are no lights of any kind in my bathroom that aren't tied to the switch. Also I rapidly alternate between being freezing cold and burning up so the cold floor is ideal (I also bring a blanket.) If it has hit this point I'm often in there for 4-6 hours before I can at least move to the bedroom.
The worst one, however, I spent 8 hours in the bathroom and for that entire 8 hours I never stopped vomiting. Well, I did, but only because there was nothing left inside of me. Dry heaving for that amount of time is not fun and it is even worse when combined with the terrible pain of the migraine. I never want to have that happen again. I genuinely don't know how people who get Migraines once a week or even more often can do it. If I got migraines like that every few days I would have blown my brains out a long time ago.
I try to avoid my triggers as best as possible but I was also prescribed sumatriptan as a last resort to take if I know it is going to hit. It has its own side effects that suck but it sucks a lot less than the migraine it prevents.
I was diagnosed with migraine as a kid when I was 10. The doctor made me undergo a battery of tests including a contrast CT scan that consumed aj entire day, only to confirm at the end of the day that it was migraine. The migraines weren't even that debilitating but my mom was just being extra careful.
After that, I still got headaches at a good frequency and tried all sorts of specialists from orthos to opthalmologists, all of who checked their areas of the body and said I was perfectly normal. The one doc I didn't see was a gastro and this was a mistake.
Eventually I grew older and realised first that my headaches were always preceded by some sinus congestion and milk was a trigger of said congestion. So I switched to lactose free milk and that helped.
Eventually I realised that I was a chronic acid reflux patient, that a lot of small symptoms I had had over the years (a feeling of something stuck in the throat, congestion etc) were basically just the gut throwing up acid, or more accurately LPR/silent reflux. The reflux was the actual trigger of my headache. So my usual medication of Paracetamol, or worse, ibuprofen was actually making it worse in the medium/long term.
I switched my strategies to fixing the gut/acid reflux instead of treating the headache. The max I do nowadays is 325mg of paracetamol if I need to sleep and the pain doesn't let me. Ibuprofen is a nuclear option that I haven't resorted to in years.
The gut issue is still not resolved, I suppose years of damage to the oesophagus takes time to heal, so I'm still prone to reflux but I make do with a bland diet, avoiding triggers like milk and resorting to PPIs for short bursts during an attack. Oh and I also do the bending while swallowing trick that was on HN sometime back, which has helped immensely.
My headaches are mostly a thing of the past. Haven't had a debilitating one in years.
I spent most of my life thinking "migraine" was just a really bad headache. Until I started getting migraines. The best way to describe it is a band of white hot pain, almost a stabbing sensation. It started behind the eyes and would spread everywhere. Not confined to my head, a full-on nervous system meltdown: extreme light sensitivity, blurred vision, trouble with balance and coordination, nausea, numbness, and residual effects that lasted over a day. With a migraine, there is no "take an advil and power through" - you sit in a dark room and pray.
Any other migraineurs share what I call "Silver Bullet Fatigue" at trying new treatments? I've been at this for six decades with no magic solution for my own migraine problems, and I've lost count of all the neurological investigations, meds, scans, treatments, and helpful or sometimes utterly silly suggestions that have come up short over the years. Some have come close but had undesireable side effects, others made me very ill in their own right. At this point I just don't have much desire to go through the treatment wringer again. Am I alone in this sort of fatigue?
Hey. I am not a migraine guy but a paroxysmal, full-body, painful hives type of guy. Like some migraine people, my symptoms eventually stopped happening after trying all sorts of things for years, and I can't say precisely what the "cure" really was. Or if I am not just in a 7-year-long remission.
Anyway, I experienced this fatigue you speak of. I am not sure this will help you since your fatigue appears to come from blood tests/medical treatments, but hopefully it helps somebody. What helped was when the suggestion was something I could do that was healthier/cheaper/more beneficial than what I was currently doing, I would frame it as, "This might not fix my debilitating problem, but it will improve my life in some way. So, worst case scenario, I'm in the green."
Examples (I am not suggesting these as migraine silver bullets, but I am trying to clarify what I mean):
- Someone in this thread mentioned cutting out xanthan gum and other thickening agents has helped. Will that cure you? Probably not. Is it a healthy lifestyle change? Probably. Why not try?
- I cut out processed food, which helped me realize that I was eating 1-3 frozen Trader Joe's meals per day.
- I got an air quality monitor that made me realize the brain fog I felt at night was due to worsening air quality in my home.
- I switched to unscented soap and laundry detergent, which was cheaper. (Artificial laundry scent now smells sickly and synthetic to me, which may be a downside.)
- I set up reminders for change-by dates for furnace/car filters, vacuuming, dusting etc.
I don't know if any of this is why I don't experience symptoms anymore, but I don't regret any of it, and have long-term positive effects regardless.
Lastly, after several creams & allergy pills, I stopped getting my hopes up that anything would fix me. Expectation management is essential for avoiding fatigue.
Hope this helps you or somebody else. I am sorry you have suffered for so long.
Last spring, I broke my ankle severely (trimalleolar fracture with dislocation). I had a very long string of complications following that: fracture blisters, nerve block rebound pain, opioid withdrawal, atrophy, infections, nerve pain, bone fragments, etc. It seems that right when things seem to start going well, a new complication arises.
I know it's not rational, but it's really hard to not fall into a mindset of "Why even try to fix this one, another one's going to happen anyway?" And once I start letting myself believe that, I just feel even worse.
Even before this happened, I have had a pet theory that agency (and perceived agency) is one of the most central components of psychology around anxiety and depression. This whole experience has reinforced it.
> I have had a pet theory that agency (and perceived agency) is one of the most central components of psychology around anxiety and depression
I like to think of that quality as being a person with a willing desire to be a player on the team trying to solve the health problem, in that I am generally a sunshine-y person and try to see the best in things. To me, that's the key to avoiding despair in facing my chronic, acute migraines. Having said that, it is fatiguing to face batteries of tests once again. If the science is very compelling, I'll consider it.
I'm like this with back pain. I just reminisced the other day about when I was a teen I could straddle on a brick wall and pull with my arms to twist my torso around my hips and just pop the f out of my lower back and hips, then I could stretch and move normally again.
This worked for like 2 months. I've tried tiger balm, tens, chiro, heat, cold, exercise, every medicine.
I have theracane, davinci back tool, and a long suffering wife who will stand on my back to put enough pressure on the muscles to help.
Tumeric, CBD. 7-hydroxymatiglynine nullifies the pain but I puke 60% of the time I take it, about 4 hours later.
For what it’s worth, I got a sleep study and a CPAP machine due to borderline hypertension, coincidentally also stopped taking my migraine prevention medication, and I haven’t had a single migraine since, a year and a few months later. Maybe like half of one, one time. Blood pressure is also back to normal.
In my case CGRP agonists made me feel absolutely horrible and actually gave me long-lasting gut trouble that I am still struggling with.
No.
I read a migraine book which boiled down to once you figure it out, your migraines change. Meds stop working, life changes, stress, etc. I routinely get month long migraines over the years. I’ve had all the scans, Mayo Clinic visits, eyes checked, and follow-ups.
They say it’s helpful to log things or journal but I don’t feel like it much with a migraine and blurred/double vision.
First, I know different people have different triggers from me. I used to have migraines every few days to every few months from age 13 to 23. These would incapacitate me. I would get the aura and be almost blind for an hour, then throw up a couple times, and have a bad headache for 2-4 hours, then I could function again but still felt crummy for the next 24 hours. I noticed that pickles were a trigger, and I thought "pickles have a lot of sodium". So, out of desperation as something to try, I read the labels of everything I was eating and cut out everything that had more than a little sodium: frozen pizza, frozen dinners, deli meats, etc. At the time I was having migraines every few days, and then I didn't have another migraine for years. I was so glad they stopped. I now doubt it was the sodium. In cutting out sodium, I happen to cut out processed foods, which includes lots of suspicious ingredients. I suspect Tyramine was the main culprit. There's a diet called The Headache Diet that is focused on minimizing Tyramine. Guess what else pickles have a lot of? For last last 30 years, here are all the things that have caused my migraines: Lithium Carbonate (Orotate is OK), Pickled Herring (Tyramine), Soy Sauce (Tyramine), Hyaluronic Acid (synthetic, Mobilee is OK), Tianeptine, Sulbutiamine, and a strobe light. Every migraine I have had in the last 30 years can be explained by those - only 8-12 migraines total. I still precisely control my sodium and eat no processed foods.
I too had nausea, auras with migraines when I was a teen. I think I outgrew them. That or it was my girlfriend at the time (I was about 20) that gave would snap my neck — like some kind of self-taught chiropractor.
I have been a migraineur for decades. Mine are classic aura, with the whole "looking through broken glass" thing for a half hour or so when they happen. This year one of my partner's doctors mentioned positive results from supplementing with Vitamin B-2 and Coenzyme Q10, and it has dramatcially lowered their frequency. Mine are especially bad when the air pressure is seesawing which it does a lot here in the spring and fall, but I would guess I'm down to something like 20% of the previous years numbers.
I think we have similar symptoms, but I have no headache, just the "broken glass" that passes over my vision. Usually takes about 15 mins to half an hour or so to pass.
This is the best visual representation that I have found of it ove the years:
The one aspect this misses that's so hard to communicate is the lack of visual processing inside the sort of curled aura "area". When I was getting them often as a kid, I would basically become illiterate over the course of 15minutes, because anything in that shimmering area was not parseable. I could SEE the shape of a letter, but I couldn't read the word. That shimmering area grows and grows till it's covering all of your vision, but near the start you can still read out of one side.
It was by far, the part of migraines I hated the most as a kid because it took intense pain that people assume you're overblowing, and prefaced it with 30-45 minutes of people thinking I was an idiot/doing some weird awkward joke. (Or having a stroke! The dread of not being able to speak correctly, not being able to read, a slow pain in my temple getting stronger and stronger, and now the teacher is calling 911 while the class starts screaming.)
I used to get typical migraines, starting around junior year of high school. One every 6-18 months, usually, for years. Visual auras for twenty or thirty minutes, then a few hours of bad headache.
Over the years the frequency has swung toward the longer end of that, and now the last three times I haven’t gotten the headache part at all, but other weird symptoms. One time, bad tunnel vision for a while and then feeling like I had to go to sleep immediately. Another, just a weird disconnected/disembodied feeling for a couple hours. The most recent, I got fairly bad aphasia for ten or fifteen minutes, which is the fist time anything like that’s happened to me. Not just trouble thinking of words, though that too, but knowing the word I wanted to say and having something else come out instead, no matter how many times I tried.
I haven’t tried anything but excedrine migraine. If I still got a couple a year and they still gave me like 6 hours of killer headaches, I’d probably look into something like that, but the frequency’s been closer to every other year than twice a year and I don’t get much pain with them now, so I’ve not bothered.
Maybe I should, though, given the other comments in this thread about them causing brain lesions…
Got this exact thing once last year a few months after recovering from a very bizarre and severe viral infection that ended with about 2 weeks of bells balsy.
It was bizarre. No headache at all. And unlike other posters here, I could still read easily.
I suppose an even better one would be "looking through broken glass that keeps fucking moving around".
The weirdest thing I discovered was that, back when I juggled professionally, I couldn't read at all during that aura but could still juggle, even hard things like 5+ balls. Strangely it did not screw up peripheral vision.
Worst time was when it came on before a music school performance. Not a hope in hell of keeping track of which line the little circles were on...
Ah yes, that visual is perfect. I showed something similar to a friend a long time ago and they said 'that's migraine? i have that every few weeks but not much else so never thought much of it; i thought migraines meant headaches'.
Just want to second this. I was getting migraines every 2 weeks (visual auras, thumping headache for 3-6 hours etc) mainly triggered by stress & lack of sleep as far as I could tell. Started taking Vitamin B and I haven't had a migraine since - for over a year).
There is research to back this up as well:
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33779525/
- Conclusion: Vitamin B2 400 mg/day significantly reduced the duration, frequency, and pain score of migraine attacks.
I've tried not CoQ10 and high doses of B2, without any impact on my aura frequency or duration. Migraine auras are such a pesky thing which medical science clearly doesn't understand. The typical migraine drugs like triptans are useless for auras, since the drugs typically take longer to kick in that the duration of the aura.
Glad to hear the supplements are working. And you get to impress peope with the colour of your pee!
There seems to be a link between migraines and Mithocondrial Disease. If frequency/intensity of migraines diminishes with Vitamin B and Q10, it may be worth investigating. Especially if you have muscular fatigue or exhaustion.
I have been diagnosed with vestibular migraines. No pain, just dizziness and brain fog and vision issues (feels like my eyes don’t point in the same direction). I also have a doctor that says I have symptoms of mold exposure (lots of correlative testing and also house testing and remediation). I have also been diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy by my neurologist, but my mold doctor says that is consistent with mold exposure. I also have a vestibular degradation, one side of my balance center is damaged. I think all of it is related and linked by inflammation. I do think that mold is part of the story, but definitely not all of it. Anti seizure medication helps a lot. Ubrelvy (a gepants) also helps a lot. Getting the right kind of sleep and exercise and staying hydrated also all help. I am nearly 50 and this a new thing that has happened in the last 2-3 years. Was not fun to go through this on the tail end of running a startup. The brain fog was debilitating. I am now 80% better with meds (and a shit ton of supplements) but still on the journey to figure out how to get back to normal and off all the meds. I do think it is inflammation related but it could be one of a zillion things, or a combination of many.
Wife has been struggling with vestibular migraines for about 20 years. It really came to a head about 5 years ago, and we spent the following three years seeing specialist after specialist and trying around a dozen different medications. During this time she had daily flare-ups and missed a lot of work and spent most days in bed or on the couch.
What ended up working in the end? We finally got into Mayo, and they suggested an SSRI (at a fairly high dose). She also figured out that she has a few food triggers (yogurt and freshly baked bread are 2 bad ones). She also discovered she has double vision, and now wears prism glasses. We think the combination of double vision and whatever brain chemistry imbalance she had was "overloading" her vision and vestibular systems, and she would basically just shut down. Treating both of those seems to have (mostly) alleviated things for her.
I completely understand what you've gone though and how frustrating it is, especially given the very vague criteria for diagnosing and treating vestibular migraine.
Yes. A lot of it. It was maybe 10% effective at best.
The way one ENT described it, I have 40% degradation on one side. If it’s constant, your brain adjusts and you are essentially ok. If something happens to vary that then your brain can’t adjust. My theory is that you add inflammation or migraines or epilepsy or all of it and the brain can’t compensate.
I used to have very many (multiple a week) and was under specialist care for it in my 20s. Turned out to be stress though (doctors didn't buy this but couldn't find any other reason either, but once I stopped going to the office, I have had 0; I stopped going 25 years ago and had 0 for 25 years). I found what killed them almost immediately; 1 shot of vodka. When I saw the lines and the auras starting to come (usually tunnelvision and some vague jagged lines would announce an oncoming attack), I would immediately knock down 1 shot of vodka and it would go away while just causing a slight headache, but none of the rest of the very bad things I would otherwise have like double vision, splitting cluster headaches, auditory features, dizziness and tingling in my face, some of that lasting for days. I would all skip that with 1 shot. Just not having them is nicer though; whatever helped, I am very happy I discovered it relatively early on.
Hello, fellow migraine sufferers. I sincerely want you to read the fantastic essay "In Bed" by Joan Didion. It is a fantastic reflection on what it is like to have migraines and it makes me cry every time I read it because it makes me feel seen and understood.
"For I had no brain tumor, no eyestrain, no high blood pressure, nothing wrong with me at all: I simply had migraine headaches, and migraine headaches were, as everyone who did not have them knew, imaginary."
Read it; it's a google search away. You'll thank me.
I read a book a while ago. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name (maybe AI can find it), but the premise was based on a metaphor: there are multiple hot air balloons that, together, affect the chance/severity of a migraine. Something like food, sleep, stress, hydration, and one more. One of these "balloons" filling up may be enough to trigger a migraine, while all of them partially filling up can also trigger a migraine.
Sorry for the rough recall, but the point is that there may not be a silver bullet solution simply because it's not one thing contributing all of the time. I can trigger on all four of the ones I listed. I've had migraines for a week straight now because I recently developed tinnitus and am struggling to sleep. However, I had a migraine the week before because I inadvertently consumed red dye, which triggered massive inflammation in my body.
So, for me, it's all about managing multiple things enough to not get above the threshold.
A metaphor I heard once, second hand from a neurologist, was that of making a stress stew. You add in the elements slowly over time into the pot -- barometric pressure, painful perfumes, an odd sleeping position, some traffic, marital issues, whatever -- and then at some ill-defined point it crosses a threshold into being a proper stress stew (ie a migraine).
If you've suffered, seek a current expert (e.g., a neurologist migraine specialist who has recently completed training).
The newer CGRP inhibitors have been highly effective, but that also has made some specialists grow stale in their assessment skills.
Pain is emotionally debilitating, but sorting out complex chronic migraines takes persistence, patience, and an excellent diagnostician. It can take a few long-term trials of treatment and environmental/behavior changes. Be a good patient: bring accurate contemporaneous journals and openness to new suggestions, and stick with an agreed regime pending re-evaluation. Above all, don't just try to power through or mask the pain.
I tried to find this advice in the thread but couldn’t, and I’m surprised since it’s surprisingly common!
Some sweeteners such as aspartame can trigger migraines (also some gut issues) depending on the quantity and person. While most of the people can take them just fine in principle, others suffer migraines a while after taking them. In my case, this was a relative who suffered a lot until finding out by pure chance that certain sweeteners where the reason, but you can find countless cases.
When I was a child I couldn't drink diet soda and then go play outside during the summer, I'd get a wicked headache. I've never had a migraine, based on the descriptions I've heard.
> When May started researching migraine in the 1990s, the leading hypotheses were that migraine was either a psychological issue or a vascular headache disorder, with throbbing pain caused by dilation of blood vessels. The psychological associations came with stigma, May says.
[...]
A lot changed in the 1990s, when May and others began conducting brain scans of people with migraine.
Sure, who the hell is this guy, and his discovery of the cortical spreading depression phenomenon:
I've thought for a long time now that everyone has a migraine all the time, but migraine sufferers temporarily lack the brain's ability to ignore the ever-present pain.
In other words, the migraine isn't the addition of pain, but the absense of a pain relief mechanism. I have no sources to back this up, other than personal observation.
I got told that it could be indeed the case that my brain continuously has small seizures but only from time to time they break trough and cause the pain and auras which I would then experience. They wanted to measure the brainwaves to figure out if that was the case. That would also somehow fit what OP said, so I guess this is known in the medical world already. Or at least something in that direction.
Only that's not how auras seem to work. The current understanding is that they are caused by cortical spreading depression - a slow travelling wave which depolarizes the brain cells it passes through. These don't just happen randomly in healthy controls.
Well, I think the Auras is my brain failing to filter out visual noise, which then get's into a feedback loop and builds up. And that might be related to other filter functions failing. I think that, becaus4 once in a while, I'm able to suppress the Aura conciously, when it is still very small.
Some auras have a musculo-skeletal origin. For example, some neck issue irritates a nerve or alters the pressure in a blood vessel, which in turn affects the optic nerve.
I have suffered them myself, and they always came in a sequence: arm pain, neck pain, headache and aura. Finally, I'd release tension in my neck and it'd be gone.
My doctor confirmed injuries in cervical discs also seem to be causally linked to auras, but there might be other causes as well.
The pounding pain that corresponds with heartbeat. It makes me think there are nerves that register this all the time but there's some part of the nervous system that filters that signal out.
If you have pounding pain from heartbeat, you should go see a doctor. That is not normal.
One feature of migraines is not just a headache. Some people can feel it coming, called the aura. I feel weird during and after the headache. I frequently get the migraine weird feeling without the headache, so-called silent migraine. Migraines and normal headaches feel different.
I always feel a bit weird when reading migraine threads on the internet, because mine seem so much milder, but it's still debilitating. I remember first noticing the migraines in grade when I was 16, but it took me years before realizing they were migraines. I thought that most people had pain like I did, and just powered through with some Advil/Tylenol.
My migraines follow a very regular schedule. I wake up and just know that I will have a migraine. It's like a nagging thought. Worse after days of poor/little sleep, or days where the temperature changes dramatically, or if there is a big storm. At around 14:00 the pain grows in intensity, I feel nauseous and uncoordinated, very sensitive to light. Lying in a dark room and listening to a podcast/YouTube video is the best way to get through this period, I can get to the edge of sleep and it makes it easier. At around 20:00 the pain has usually mostly subsided, and by 22:00 I'm pain free but exhausted.
I tried a few prescription medications after talking with a doctor, but they didn't have much of an effect, so I just accepted that once every 1/2 weeks I would have to deal with it. Whenever I would read about migraines online, I would feel relieved, because mine seemed so much more mild. No aura, the pain is usually gone within a day, and if I needed to be out and about I could manage, even though it was painful.
About 5 years ago an ex-partner offered me a Bufferin (Aspirin mix), and right away it helped with the symptoms. Read into it and saw a study that suggested some people respond well to high-doses of aspirin and caffeine for migraine relief. It worked exceptionally well for me. 9/10 migraines knocked out immediately, with the rest being substantially reduced in length and intensity. I get maybe 1 migraine a year now that is truly bad.
Recently talked to a new doctor who prescribed me propanolol (he was afraid about the high dose of aspirin on my stomach), and it's been just as good.
I just feel fortunate to have easy access to migraine relief, and I hope that others are able to find something that works for them as well.
I think my biggest trigger is changing weather. I usually attribute this to changing light levels but I'm not sure.
I spent about 30 years getting migraines before I realized that wearing sunglasses helps my light sensitivity. It seems like that'd be a fairly intuitive thing to have tried, but somehow I never did.
> Migraine can even drive full-blown visual hallucinations similar to the ‘reflections of the living light’ painted by Hildegard von Bingen, a twelfth-century abbess who was thought to have experienced a condition that is now called migraine with aura.
I don't think the aura effects are usually considered hallucinations?
I get mild migraines sometimes, with hardly noticeable headache, but with aura. In a way, it's pretty cool. You can directly perceive the abnormal brain activity and how it develops in real time. (I get the classic zigzag lines wandering across the field of vision.)
I also have migraine with aura. There are visual effects but also when I am looking into the mirror I can't see half of my face and give this is a wrong perception of reality you might consider it a hallucination?
Same, the fortification aura is really kind of amazing, putting aside the debilitating pain that's quickly approaching. It's really weird to have a part of your vision just "not there" as opposed to being black. It's even stranger when looking at a face or some recognizable object, and half of it disappears into nothingness while the other half still exists. Fun to play with.
the first time i had this, everyone's nose was missing. for ten seconds it was funny and then i hid in a bathroom stall at work, and texted my wife goodbye. i was positive i was about to die. its really stressful to have bodies.
I happen to be a man who gets migraines with aura, but I do think they’re more common in women. They started when I was 14.
I get visual issues like tunnel vision and sparklies, but I also get numbness in my face and extremities, confuse my words (right parts of speech, not what I intend to say), and often vomit.
Needless to say, the first one scared the crap out of my mother and I.
I may or may not have a headache when this happens.
Neat, eh? I was talking to a guy who suffered from seizures in college, and apparently his “aura” is very similar, and I've always wondered if there was some connection since my father also suffers from epilepsy.
> I get visual issues like tunnel vision and sparklies, but I also get numbness in my face and extremities, confuse my words (right parts of speech, not what I intend to say), and often vomit.
I’ve experienced migraines for years, but last year had my first instance that messed with speech. It certainly unsettled the friend I was with at the time.
Migraines and epilepsy have a lot in common, including some symptoms and triggers. Drugs and things that lower seizure threshold also tend to cause migraines. Some epilepsy drugs also act as migraine prophylactics.
I'm male and I get visual auras with migraines (not often, only once or twice a year). It's like a small area of old TV static or (as I call them) "dead pixels" in my vision. It's usually centered right in the middle of my vision, so reading becomes impossible but I could do something else.
It usually spreads a little bit before dissipating. They can happen with or before the actual migraine pain.
I sometimes but not always get an aura before a migraine.
Which was pretty fun the first time i got an aura, as i was working in a chemistry lab. I described what was happening (loss of vision, flashes of light, rapidly oscillating black and white patterns) to this greybeard lab technician and within 5 minutes the entire lab was evacuated, out of fear of some weird chemical poisoning us all.
I tend to get migraines occasionally. For me the trigger is stress. So if I can try to avoid stress, I wouldn't get migraines as quickly. Sadly, in modern life it's sometimes hard to avoid stress.
Maybe 5 years ago, to treat my migraines, my girlfriend advices me to visit a massage therapist in Pattaya, as he's helped many people, Thai and foreigner, to get rid of migraines. I had a message session at his shop (including a lot of neck and head massages) and he gave me some herbal medicine to eat for 1 or 2 months. Afterwards, didn't have migraines for a couple of years. But the migraines came back, I think about 2 years ago. I might visit the message therapist again in the future if we plan to visit Pattaya (we live in Chiang Mai province, so it's like 800 km away).
I know of a girl in our village who also had a lot of migraines. She visited some kind of Chinese medicine doctor in Chiang Mai. He made some small holes in the head, blood would go outside. Not sure how many sessions the girl got, but from my understanding her migraines are gone now.
My migraines are usually as follows:
- usually lasts for around a day
- sometimes one side of the brain (temple area) is very painful (like a drill inside), sometimes both sides
- arteries around the area in brain where is pain are visibly thick
- pain in head & neck area, not so much in rest of body
- sensitive to light
Showering in hot water helps relieve the pain a bit, my guess is because it might improve blood flow. I tend to take hot showers a couple of times a day during migraine attacks.
Other things that seem to relieve a bit are ginger tea (fresh ginger), tiger balm on pain area in head & head and neck messages.
I have also noticed that for some reason hot showers and also shoulder and head massage help seem to help a lot, but only about as long as I am in the shower or have the massage. And also putting Vicks VapoRub on scalp seems to help a lot, but it is quite messy. However, a triptan medication I have started to use recently, seems to help even more.
As someone who deals with migraines, this article really hits home. I'm glad there's progress being made, but it’s also a bit disheartening to see how much we still don't know
I started having migraines in my late teens after drinking too much alcohol at parties, I used to think they were hangovers. It was only much later, after getting migraines in daily life, I found out after visiting a neurologist that those hangovers were migraines. Been having frequent migraines ever since, most of the time triggered by stress. Often I'd have attacks 3-4 times a week, fortunately the intensity is not crippling, more like a 6-7 out of 10. And now the good part, I have been supplementing Omega 3 and Magnesium during the last couple of months and haven't had a severe attack since. It's worth trying out if you suffer frequent attacks like I did.
edit: my experience with sumatriptan, is that it helps stave off an attack, but frequent use increased the frequency of my attacks, leading to almost daily attacks, so I stopped taking it.
Just so people are aware there are several types of magnesium supplements and they all do different things. One of them is for relieving constipation and will not help with migraines, probably.
For instance I've recently started trying magnesium glycinate as a sleep aid.
Anyhow I don't know which is which so I look it up.
thank you so much. now i just need to track down which magnesium of the 4 dozen you're supposed to supplement to help vitamin D do its job. My research on stuff like this is slow going because i always get nerd-sniped by the mechanics of the minerals and metals in our bodies.
As someone with a traumatic brain injury, I get a lot of migraines. My favorite piece of advice from a doctor? 'Allow yourself to relax'.......sure.....that's the issue.....
Reading this as I'm just coming down from a migraine. I've been getting them since I was a young teen. I get migraines with aura. They used to last for hours. Sometimes I get them multiple times per week, then they disappear for months/years and suddenly will get them again. No significant life or dietary changes in between. I've never been able to pin down what causes them.
These days they've become much more manageable. The aura and headache part takes 30-60 minutes as opposed to 5+ hours when I was a teen. I do experience brainfog, fatigue, dizzyness and nausea for 24+ hours afterwards, but at least I'm not stuck under the covers for hours.
To hell with the drugs that they throw at you for headaches. It's your diet, lifestyle and poor sleep that's drives this bus.
I'll save you 10 years of my suffering and the awful side effects induced from the cocktail of drugs in this article and say I've reversed cluster headaches and can now tell when anything is not good for my body goes into it.
I did an elimination diet, I skip breakfast usually, and did 1 successful session of hyperbaric oxyegen treatment and it's completely changed my life.
Ive been able to continue ketosis periodically and am adding foods back now 1 by 1 to see what induces pain and believe it or not your body will tell you.
My latest revelation was legumes which tricks you, high in carb item that apparently is a different type of carb that doesn't digest in the bottom of your gut like other carbs. (1)
This list of positive side effects can only seen as a miracle to me from being on the edge of survival (my clusters were headed towards a manic state)
-I don't get down and cynical at all like I used to
-my daily energy is a magnitude of about 5x stronger
-confidence and positivity are the first reactions i have now so it's greatly uplifted everyone around me
- there is a level of even keel rationality that I have now that I've never ever had
- just alot more calmer overall and easier to get the busy mind not to overworry
I've tried many drugs and techniques but everything felt like a bandaid on the problem and not actually addressing it
Big and large psychedelic doses, triptans, cgrp, mood stabilizers, steroids. If they had it i tried it.
It took about 1 month of major diet changes to start feeling better. A year in now and the two things that feel the worst for setting off mild nero inflamation are 1-not getting good sleep and 2-eating highly processed foods
Your mileage may vary, everyone reacts to food differently.
As someone who has healed from some weird conditions by doing what you suggest (specially diet), I would be cautious about implying that everyone else is on the same path. Some people may have excellent diets and sleep schedules but still suffer from migraines or other debilitating conditions.
While I agree that lifestyle factors are often overlooked, especially in the West where we tend to medicalize every symptom, sometimes the root cause of the issue remains unknown. Suggesting that it's always due to something like not following a proper diet can be harmful.
I run or cycle daily and do small triathlons / half marathons in the summer. I’m mostly vegetarian. I weigh 155 lbs and I’m 5’11”. I sleep fine.
I get random severe migraines 2-3 times a year.
I discovered sumatriptan. It stops the migraine almost instantly when i sense one coming on (my vision starts to “fuzz out”).
Before this I would lose a day recovering in a dark room lying down. I was scared whenever I backpacked or went on long trips that I would have a migraine at the wrong time. Sumatriptan freed me from this.
I’m glad OP found a cure that works for them but everyone is different.
I am suffering from migraine since 20 years and it's really painful.
In 20 years, the only causes that I can infer are sleep deprivation and weekend.
I found some relief with acupuncture: a bench of sessions of acupuncture reduce the intensity and increase the distance between two attacks.
In the last years I was prescribed triptanes and they are very effective to me, but I feel "strange" when I get them.
> “I used to think that disability travels with pain, and it’s only when the pain gets severe that people are impaired. That’s not only false, but we have treatments to do something about it,” says Richard Lipton, a neurologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.
He's saying that he used to just view the pain of migraines as a disability, but now realizes that there are other components to migraines besides pain that cause disability (such as brain fog, emotional instability, blindness, etc)
Right- even though I was able to figure that bit out on second or third reading, it threw me enough that the second clause didn't truly make sense. Also, the subjects of "That's not only false" and "to do something about it" are _different_. So my train of thought kept derailing.
Yes! I’m a 50+ woman diagnosed as a teenager, and daily magnesium changed my life. I rarely get a migraine these days, and I’m glad to hear it’s effective for others.
The only medicine I’ve used that has all but completely eliminated my migraines during usage (Aimovig).
Unfortunately, to get these — you have to provide an arm and a leg to insurance, even when a neurologist is vouching for you.
Nothing makes me consider violence more than meeting with a highly educated, vetted, practitioner of medicine — having a conclusive conversation about a treatment plan, and then having my fucking insurance say “ope, sorry — you have to prove you need this medicine by trying anti-depressants (which might incidentally help, but not designed for migraines), or this other thing which also may incidentally help (but not designed for migraines)”
Get this — I got a prescription for Aimovig, all positive results (for a year and a half) and my insurance is still getting in the way of fulfilling the script (each month). If I miss the dose, I get a massive rebound migraine — and I’ve missed several doses because my insurance wants to send another letter to my neuro “hey are you claiming this is still worth it?”
I recall about 10 or 15 years ago at work in the lunchroom it was me and maybe six younger people. Me age 40 them about age 20 six all said they have migraines I didn't, didn't know anyone who did. It seemed odd so many claimed to have migraines. I assumed they meant a bad headache not actual migraines but were using the term migraine to mean a bad headache.
I have experienced migraines since my teens, usually starting with annoying visual artifacts, facial numbness, difficulty speaking, and progressing to intense pain. The worst of them would also cause auditory discomfort.
In my 20s, I could reliably trigger a migraine by doing something intensely physical (like playing basketball with friends) and drinking lots of cold water or taking a cool shower.
Since then, it's been harder to determine a cause other than stress. About 15 years ago, work was really stressful and I had numerous migraines in a four-month period. Once I even got a demerol IM shot, which seemed like much ado about nothing -- I was hoping for great relief, but it didn't seem to do much.
Now in my 50s, I only get about one a year, and it's pretty mild.
Just an anecdote, but very close person of mine was diagnosed with migraine when she was 12 yo old so.
Last year, being 40+ years old, suffering from weekly/daily pain events, she found out that diagnose was wrong (one doctor just asked that have you ever thought that this probably isn't migraine) and correct diagnose was Horton / cluster headache.
Eating migraine meds (lots of different ones) for several years were helping, but probably only due placebo effect.
Now, the medicine for headache attacks is simple: breathing pure oxygen for 15 minutes.
After last attack (1.5 year ago, stopped almost immediately breathing oxygen) there has not been any headaches.
Usually, it would not been nice to get diagnose for cluster headache, but on this case it was kind of life saver.
I think everyone who suffers migraines has their own “relationship” with them.
Myself, I can tell when I am “pre-migraine” and know I have to sit down for a bit lest one develops. They most often come from eating junk food after exercise (I’m looking at you, Fritos). And warming my hands often helps speed the recovery, though I always end up with “tender brain” for 24-48h after.
I’m intrigued by another poster having success with Magnesium L-Threonate and will be placing an order today. Even if I don’t have a migraine, I have a headache 8 days out of 10.
> They most often come from eating junk food after exercise (I’m looking at you, Fritos).
Dehydration causes a good portion of mine, at least of the ones that I can point to a proximate cause of. I wonder if that's what you're experiencing, with the salty food after sweating?
I had a migraine for more than 15 years. After quitting caffeine completely as a self-experiment, it never came back. When the migraine came, I had it for at least 3 days without improving. So I had to take something with Triptan, like Dolortriptan.
The book "Heal Your Headache" by David Buchholz which, while a bit dated, has some good advice, recommends completely quitting caffeine. It talks a lot about diet, but it has the strongest words for caffeine. It considers it the worst of the food culprits.
It also has some controversial/outdated info, like:
- A migraine is a normal headache, but worse
- Don't take triptans -- get off them if you're on them
- Migraines are vascular.
Not saying it's wrong, but it's definitely controversial. I have no idea about the author's views on CGRP blockers, since the book considerably predates them.
I've never tried hard enough to quit caffeine. I'd like to give it a go. I typically feel better migraine-wise when I'm drinking 1 cup daily than when I'm drinking 2-3. But confounding variables etc etc etc.
Migraines being more than a headache has been the norm for at least 15-20 years. I remember hearing about how cluster headaches could be treated with psilocybin. I'm not able to access the rest of this article, but what's the new thing here? We already knew for years its not "just a headache"
i have been getting bad migraines for as long as i can remember. bad enough to vomit when i was a kid. nothing ever helped except when i took a healthy dose of lsd in highschool and they stopped completely for five years or so. i had been getting them around once every two months before that. then they came back in college and slowly got worse until i was having basically one long migraine for up to a week at a time. then i started taking nurtech. it helped a lot but only worked half the time — and when it did work i could still feel my body reeling from it but without pain. here is something curious: i noticed that nurtech would put me into an extremely good mood… almost to the point of being a different person. without any euphoria or intoxication. specifically, i noticed that i was much more open emotionally, much more personable and friendly. more open to letting people in. and thats when i really started to have a new perspective on just how much this disease had robbed from me. i cant even imagine how awesome it would have been to not be interrupted by these migraines, to not have to feel the throbbing pain, and maybe the whole trajectory of my life would have been different if i had been a little kinder and likable which, if im being honest, i was kind of known for not being. i dont really take nurtech anymore because i have found that hard physical work, sunlight, reducing total calories and cardiovascular exercise basically put them into remission. and im afraid of what nurtech might do to me long-term after seeing how profoundly it alters my personality. based on everything i know, i think its safe to say that migraines are a metabolic disorder. neurons become overexcited due to metabolic dysfunction which then causes a depolarization cascade that sweeps across other regions of the brain. thats why keto helps so much. i wonder if ozempic has a beneficial impact on migraine?
I get one about once a decade. My mother got them frequently.
Real migraines absolutely suck. A lot of folks describe regular headaches as “migraines,” but they are a pale imitation of the real thing.
In my case, they usually start in the morning, but don’t get really excruciating until early evening. I usually figure out it’s a migraine, about lunchtime. Around 9-10PM or so, I puke, then the headache starts leveling off, until I fall asleep. The next day, it’s as if nothing happened.
I did “short-circuit” one, the last time one started, using advice that I remembered from my mother. I sat in a recliner, in a dark room, with a towel wrapped around the top of my head and eyes (probably looked ridiculous). It’s important not to engage my eyes at all. After a couple of hours, the headache stopped.
On the contrary, I'd argue that migraines are probably much more common than diagnosed, rather than the other way around. Migraines, much like seizures, vary in both symptoms and severity.
Not my area of expertise, but anecdatally, everyone that I know, that has suffered from diagnosed migraines, has had really crippling symptoms. They seem to be fairly universally severe. I have had headaches all my life (including ones related to a brain tumor, back in the 1990s. The migraines don’t seem to be related to that tumor, which was treated with surgery). In my personal experience, the comparison is night and day. There’s a clear difference.
Basically, a migraine is a “day-ending” event. In my case, I’m fortunate that I can still get stuff done in the morning, but after lunch, the day’s pretty much a write-off.
I’m really grateful that they are so rare (I’ve had three full-term, and one “aborted” one, in the last 30 years). My mother used to get one or two a month, and her day ended fairly early. When I was a teenager, I got them more frequently.
I used to think everyone got migraines everyday, then I got diagnosed with sleep apnea. Hardly a thing for me anymore now that I use cpap, but I dealt with them constantly until my senior year in college.
But it reminds me how we only really know our own reality, and it's easy to assume our experience as "normal".
Anecdotal, but: I know someone with relevant migraine problems did a log of everything she was eating or doing, searching for possible triggers. After a few weeks there were a couple of suspects: glutamate, chocolate, and also some legumes. Removing these worked and reduced greatly the amount and extent of the problem. Currently legumes is ok sometimes, but consuming one of the first two is almost a guaranteed episode.
Haven't had a migraine with visual auras since giving up alcohol fwiw. My friend's dad specializes in headache treatment he said majority is dehydration which would add up for my case but interesting to see a comment below where someone gets them from too much water so I guess having the correct water balance is key.
Just throwing it in here in case it helps someone: if you have migraines, get an eye exam to check if you need glasses (you might not realize it!) and that your prescription is still sufficient.
long-time listener, first-time caller on HN.
I've had migraines since I was a teen. Full blackout vision, then debilitating headache for 48 hours.
About 18months ago I cut out food containing thickening agents (Xantham gum aka 415, et al). Have only had a migraine since then when I've had food containing these (which seems to be an increasing number of foods).
I don't suggest it's a cure all, but worth trying for others out there. I've sat in job interviews, my wedding, kids' events dreading having one occur.
Lucky enough to get really quick relief from over the counter migraine meds (triptanes) at even tiny doses. Life changing when I realized I didn't have to do just obscene amounts of ibuprofen and coffee for pretty poor results, and even a half of these tiny pills worked.
Careful with them, they can trigger medically-induced migraines if overused. I did that mistake and it went to 3 days migraines every week (and 3x10mg + more every week)
I had migraines which ceased when I switched from a steroid nasal spray to an allergy nasal spray. I guess the steroid spray was not good for my brain.
Edit: I even reintroduced the spray 2 years later (out of allergy spray) and had another migraine. It was surprising, as I only used it for a few days.
I’ll be damned if they’re not the result of some sort of swelling or inflammation of capillaries or the optic never or something. I can feel it in such clear detail.
I used to wonder if the headaches I have had were migraines. Then I had the kind where you go blind for a few minutes, followed by a migrain. Was the worst headache I've ever had, but I was so glad to have my vision back.
I had migraines with aura as a child from 12 to 16 years old. But then I got bruxism and the migraines went away. Traded one problem for another, I guess.
my wife would get a migraine every single day around 1pm. she scheduled her college around them. she did a bunch of genetic tests, and (this is not science to me, i dont know the process at all) she ended up trying a methylated vitamin b complex, 8333% usda dose, and they dried right up forever. i feel for anyone dealing with them. i got my first one 7 years ago and learned i am sensitive to soybeans. i can pop some raw soybeans into my mouth and have a visual aura and migraine within 30 minutes, it's fascinating.
My eyes were opened a few years ago when I was reading my mom’s brain mri report. She had cancer and was undergoing radiation treatment. The MRI noted lesions and said they could be due to cancer/radiation OR MIGRAINES!
Search Migrainous Infarction. I had one when I was 32 (53 now). It's very rare, but a migraine can cause a stroke (ie. permanent brain damage), because of impaired blood flow. It left me with a permanent scotoma ("black" hole in my fov, visible from both eyes and with both eyes open).
I was scanning the comments to see if anyone needed that information.
If the aura doesn't stop after an hour, better go to the hospital (aura means reduced blood flow). Also NEVER take triptans during an aura.
Can confirm, I had a brain MRI in my early 20s and had a number of white matter lesions that were supposedly caused by migraines. No other cognitive or neurological issues. But I'm due for another scan soon and hoping they haven't worsened :P
Might be a question of cause and effect. My neurologist theorized my migraines were triggered by microemboli leaking through a PFO (leak between left and right side of the heart: normally the lungs filter this stuff out)
PFO closed, migraines basically gone.
PFO can lead to stroke too for the same reason, and that's when it's usually closed, after a stroke. Not all migraines are caused by PFO. I went on blood thinners first for a year as a test.
I seem to get migraines from plant fats and stimulants like caffeine.also caffeine withdrawal.Been drinking chaga coffee a few days and feel so much better in the evening
My migraines have been with me for ten years now and they have slowly evolved their symptoms and triggers. Started off more as typical migraines that happened every other day, though i had head issues everyday. it later evolved to neck pain, jaw pain, temple numbness, throbbing headaches, inability to think or process things. lots of cooccurring head symptoms include feeling of blood pulsing.
visited countless medical people, most offered no real solutions or relief.
only consistent insight, temperature baths for my head reduced at least tthe superficial symptoms but not the cognitive symptoms, the superficial symptoms seemed to be aggravated by sleep. the cognitive symptoms correlated to hard processing and thinking, straining the brain.
but the detriment to my life made it hard balancing work and responsibilities. worse is the symptoms are debilitating at times and invisible, good luck getting sympathy or understanding from other people with that being the case. im homeless cause its better to not have repsonsibilities and control how much i strain my brain than deal with the headaches daily and worse.
this whole ordeal makes you realize how limited the medical profession is.
I get migraines about 6 - 8 times a year, complete with visual aura and very occasionally speech aphasia. I tracked them in a spreadsheet for years so have a rough idea of triggers but it's proven fairly bad at predicting.
I've tried many drugs to combat them, but there is one thing that helps me short-circuit it 99% of the time is a high amount of caffeine. It's not perfect -- I liken it to side-stepping a train; you get missed by the train itself but still get thrown off by the wind and noise, still fall hard on the ground, still get bruised but not hurt as badly -- but it works well enough, so as soon as I get the visual aura, I slam back a strong coffee and know that it'll work. Why? No idea, perhaps the pressure in the brain's blood vessels are affected?
What I don't see as often discussed is the subtle changes in consciousness that accompany migraines.
For me, in the pre phase (12 hours or less before the true onset), the first sign that I'm heading towards one is a sudden immediate bias towards pessimism with a kind of resignedness too (which is quite unlike my normal states of mind). That's often my first clue. It's like the storm clouds are gathering on the horizon and all light and colour is drained from my life.
Then, the visual aura hits. Now I know what's happening with certainty and I hit my caffeine prophylactic. The caffeine stimulation combined with the first inklings of pain and knowledge that you're about to go "into the shit" gives you quite a fight/flight feeling. You're at a bit of a loss as to what to do, since you're amped up but there's nothing to do but wait it out.
Then once the aura fades, you feel quite strange. I'll typically go lie down at this stage. If the caffeine worked (which is like 99% likely for me), I feel in a kind of haze but I'm not in deep pain - just uncomfortable and mentally quite scattered, though I'm no longer pessimistic about the future. In fact, it's like time collapses, and I'm forced to be in the moment. It makes me feel sick to try to think about the past or future - it all feels like a huge burden to try to internalize those states of time. I just try to focus on my body and how I'm feeling. It's almost like a meditative state. I can't sleep due to the caffeine but I try to rest and keep my mind clear.
At some point I'll realize that I'm mostly through it, and can get up and move around and generally kind of resume my day. But it feels like a hangover of sorts. Everything is hazy. Thinking is difficult. Very sensitive to light and noise.
Then, surprisingly, the next day I'll feel mentally GREAT like my mind was cleaned.
Which brings me to the most interesting part of all this for me - the migraine has a lot of similarities to a psychedelic trip. There's a come-up that's distressing, a plateau where one is forced to be in-the-moment, a depletion afterwards, and the next day onwards a feeling that things are cleaner and better ordered than before, like your mind and spirit has been defragged.
Perhaps both the migraine and the psychedelics are stressors or some kind of release valve on your brain.
One wonders if there's increased brain plasticity post-migraine like with psychedelics.
I can get migraines, but they’re “silent migraines” which means there’s little or no pain aspect. Thankfully it was pretty straightforward to root out the trigger - caffeine. I still love coffee, but I’m decaf only now. I drink Equator Coffee’s natural process decafs.
I get a migraine with aura about once every 6 months. It can last between a few minutes to several hours. When this happens, part of my field of vision disappears randomly and it becomes difficult to focus on anything or read. Then after the aura, I get a bad headache.
Sometimes, if I start to feel sensitive to light (a sign that I'm about to have a migraine aura), I take a paracetamol and it prevents it completely. The trick for me is to catch it early and notice the signs. My migraines seem to correlate with my stress levels, too much thinking and/or insufficient sleep.
I used to get frequent migraine attacks - there were times when I would be down 3 days in a week, just unable to be productive. A lot of it was induced by stress.
I then tried something novel - I took some LSD. I had an intense psychedelic trip, dug deep into my psyche, realized I was a giant ball of anxiety. The anxiety's root cause was ultimately a fear of mortality (around the same time, my dad was going through a terminal illness, we spent many years in and out of ICUs, so a lot of that had soaked into me). I had to come to terms with my own mortality, which happened when I just "melted" away and lost sense of self momentarily, and once I did, I felt so much lighter as I came out of the trip.
My migraines stopped right then and there; I kid you not. I didn't get a single headache for the next 4-5 years, and in general, I was also a lot more balanced and at peace, even though I went through some highly stressful times. It was miraculous.
Of course, life has a way of creeping up on me, and I do get migraines occasionally, but when I do, I know how to stop them - I just need to slow down, meditate (not feel-good meditations all these meditation apps promote, but actually meditate and feel your muscles relaxing). That single LSD trip taught me how to relax myself physiologically.
Not saying this is going to work for everyone, just sharing my personal experience. Please keep in mind that playing with psychedelics is like playing with fire. Exercise caution.
As a counter-antidote: I know several people now who have experimented with psychedelics with the goal of addressing mental health issues who ended up significantly worse.
One of them got stuck with a nagging feeling that the world wasn’t quite real that lasted for a very long time, which resulted in a lot of anxiety.
Depersonalization and derealization are truly awful. Having experienced them for non-psychedelic reasons, it's almost indescribable.
Sometimes people say "seeing events in third person". My experience was that my consciousness and actions were completely disconnected from my observations of reality. Like, I questioned whether I had any influence at all over my existence. Basic, predictable events were suddenly uncertain and terrifying. It left me with no mental capacity to do anything but uneasily exist.
With treatment, it goes away gradually over months. I never want to go back there.
It definitely depends on the person and the state of mind they have when they go into it. I've had really overwhelming de-personalization episodes on LSD as well and they were extremely positive, life transforming experiences. I had studied and practiced Buddhism for years prior to having those experiences, though, which helped me integrate what was happening. It was like all of a sudden getting a direct experience of what was previously just words and philosophy -- "oh, this is what he was talking about."
Had I gone into it totally blind with no way to frame it it probably would have been a nightmarish scenario though. There's a reason why Right View (samyak-drishti) is the first of the 8 Noble Truths [1] and the one really emphasized in the beginning of your Buddhist practice.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_(Buddhism)
One wonders if that's how it actually is and the rest is just the brain fooling us into having control by way of rationalizing the actions we were going to do anyway.
We kinda know its like that dont we. Perhaps those who suffer such condition see throuh the abstractions our brain makes. Like seeing things in a rawer form that doesnt align well with more normative views of society.
> Like seeing things in a rawer form that doesnt align well with more normative views of society.
Psycedelics in a nutshell
There’s certainly a lot of research and a lot of philosophical thought leaning in that direction.
This suffers from the homunculus fallacy.
Without the lies our brain tells our consciousness, we couldn't function. Even core stuff like the way that we see or our experience of choice, are dependent on our brain fooling us in some way.
Luckily, we an pretty good at being hypocritical. This allows us to learn and think about this stuff while still believing the lies.
Yup - they can also give you migraines (or worse) if you introduce bugs into the "software", just as I was able to debug my problems away.
I firmly oppose the use of LSD under any circumstances, as it often marks the beginning of self-destruction, no matter how justified the reasons may seem. In my experience, those who have used LSD inevitably see their lives spiral into chaos.
There's something to be said about psychedelics and introversion in general being a two-edged sword. There's also something to be said about how we get into trouble when we consider beliefs or abstract feelings as something outside our control.
Even sub-psychedelic doses of tryptamines is known to have an effect on certain migraines and cluster headaches: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triptan
Can this family of drugs even give a psychedelic experience at higher doses? They are acting on 5-HT1B and 5-HT1D, not the 5-HT2A receptors that psychedelics act on.
I take a triptan for mine (naratriptan) and it has helped. Certainly not a cure though.
I had a headache that seemed like a cluster headache and I took lsd every week for about 3 years, I'd get 5 days headache free out of 7 - was wonderful.
Then I met a gp who actually helped and mentioned indometacin and because that worked I was diagnosed with chronic parosysmal hemicrania.
PPIs didn't work, so I took ranitidine but eventually my stomach couldn't take the indometacin anymore and I had to stop it - the headaches returned.
Then I had an abcess in my jaw that almost killed me of sepsis and had to have two surgeries on my jaw and spent a month in the hospital on antibiotics. CPH didn't return.
Now I take a mild dose of propranolol daily and I rarely have headaches or migraines.
Stress is definitely a huge migraine trigger for me too, and it's really interesting how that trip helped you get to the root of it. I haven't tried psychedelics, but I can relate to the idea that learning to truly relax (not just surface-level relaxation) can make a big difference
Psychedelic treatment of migraines has nothing to do with the trip, however. Be careful of confusing your feelings with your actual health, they are not always related.
true. the one time i used lsd i had a horrifying bad trip, like a waking nightmare. the kind of bad trip that people die from. but my migraines completely stopped for five years afterwards.
Psychedelic treatment of migraines has nothing to do with the trip, however.
What does this even mean, and where is your proof?
Be careful of confusing your feelings with your actual health, they are not always related
Why are you talking down to people, oh sage one?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triptan From a comment above.
And to respond to the latter, how many people are diagnosed every year with terminal cancer after a routine doctor’s appointment? I didn’t believe I needed an example.
> actually meditate and feel your muscles relaxing
Could you provide a short description of how you approach this? E.g. how do you start and which muscles do you focus on, etc.
This is where pseudoscience comes from. You dropped acid and think it helped you but you probably tried many different things before acid which "didn't work". In all likelihood the acid had nothing to do with it; it was just a coincidence that your symptoms improved.
Also, it's common to have a lot of migraines for a period in your life and then stop having them. Or sometimes the reverse. I used to get very painful migraines about twice a year. Eventually that stopped. I still get migraines a couple times a year but they're quick "silent migraines" i.e. not painful, just annoying and disorienting.
Possibly, but there are a lot of people that self-administer LSD for migraines who say it helps tremendously. I'm also one of those people. Between occasional LSD and daily magnesium supplementation, my migraines are very infrequent these days.
https://www.science.org/content/article/lsd-alleviates-suici...
Are you aware of the ample research and scientific knowledge on the interplay between the 5-HT2A receptor and inflammation, vasomotor effects, and effects of 5-HT2A activation on migraine and cluster headaches?
In… all likelihood you do not?
This review paper is particularly interesting, especially because nobody is discussing this and nobody has read it: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/immunology/articles/10....
The author is a serious person and this is a significant review paper of a solid and broad research foundation.
There are also studies on 5-HT2A agonists (“psychedelics”) on migraine and cluster headaches directly.
> This is where pseudoscience comes from.
I disagree, if it stopped it stopped. It could be from something else, but his LSD intake is the most likely candidate. It would become pseudoscience if he or she would claim that this will work for everyone.
Also, don't forget that science can make a similar flaw. Just because a drug works on average, doesn't mean that it will work for you or that it won't have any negative side effects. Human variation can be quite big with certain things.
This is also how many scientific discoveries start. An n=1 observation. Then more observations, then more validation. This is how we ended up getting ketamine for depression.
Stress is a common migraine trigger.
I had a similar experience but with simple Marijuana. I was getting migraines every week for months. Specifically my eye would catch light at some strange angle and it would almost burn itself onto my retina (massive light sensitivity). I was also highly stressed at the time.
I was laying in bed with a migraine on a Saturday early afternoon. Smoked some pot (I am not a day smoker, generally pretty sober during the day) and then sat down. I just told myself that this was stupid, I live an incredible life, have a family that loves me and its all self induced and I was done with it. Forced myself to get out of bed and just started moving. Trudged my way through it that day and have not really had a migraine since. This was years ago.
I have occasionally had that initial flash of light that tells me a migraine is coming (always while sitting down to work so I know its stress related). As soon as it hits, I close my eyes and just will it to go away. Has been pretty successful. A couple of times I have had to sit there for 10 minutes for the lens flare (for lack of a better word) to go away. This has happened maybe twice a year for the last ~4 years.
Not saying its self induced / stress for everyone but this worked for me.
I've suffered from migraines all my life. It worsened as I've gotten older. One day long attacks turned into three day long attacks. Then turned into five day long attacks. I've taken various preventatives and abortives over the years to varying success. It runs in my family so I never thought to see a neurologist for them. A couple years ago I had a bad string of them and my medicine wasn't really touching it, so I finally decided to see a headache specialist. The doctor very quickly got me started one of these anti-CGRP medications.
Almost immediately, I dropped to 0-1 attacks a month, and when they do happen they are both less painful and my other medicine knocks them out fast.
Literally life changing.
My mom had migraine headaches pretty much all her life. For many years she had been seeing the same doctor for her headaches.
Then she got old enough that she was on Medicaid, and she had to stop seeing that doctor because he didn’t accept Medicaid. So she found a different doctor. Different doctor prescribed a different treatment and lo and behold, her headaches pretty much went away after that.
My paternal grandmother was a migraineur, but back in the 1930s she was treated as a "hysterical" woman and given opiates. Her battles could not be overcome and she lived a short life. Thankfully the treatments have evolved.
Alors, I've been reminded that I should have referred to her as a migraineuse (feminine).
Moral of the story: if your doctor doesn’t make you feel better try another one.
Yep, I was exactly the same. It took me decades to get diagnosed, then several more years before I saw a neurologist. Now I'm on a CGRP blocker, I hardly get them at all.
In addition, my anxiety/depression is almost gone and my ADHD is about 50% improved (I'm not able to tolerate anti-ADHD meds). I love Nurtec. Expensive, but worth every penny. If my insurance didn't cover it, I'd pay out of pocket without a second thought. It's that good.
I had them in my 20s on a weekly basis but since I could stave them off with massive water intake I thought they were something else. I didn't get optical symptoms, it was just a really bad headache, nausea and chills that felt like a bad hangover. It wasn't until my 40s when I started getting optical migraines (which are scary as hell since they mimic a stroke) that I went to a dr and he diagnosed me. Apparently it's common for migraine sufferers to transition to optical migraines when they're older.
This is exactly the same as my experience. The first optical migraine was super scary.
Same pattern for me. About a year ago migraines escalated to a few times a week. Debilitating. I started searching for a solution and discovered this book [1]. It basically recommends a low carb or even a keto diet. After three weeks migrants reduced to once every three to four months, and mostly because I'm cheating on the diet. Life changing.
This is what helped me as well, plus probiotics to turn my gut flora around.
I have a nagging feeling that "migraine" is actually not an actual single disease. It's rather a syndrome, i.e. a set of symptoms people have for various different reasons.
Through keto and the probiotics experimenting, I've learned much more about how the whole gut thing "works" (very much not an exact science!) for myself and that doctors in general are clueless about it themselves. Or ignorant. Or don't want to deal with anything they can't just diagnose with a 5 minute talk.
My migraines are food related. Without the probiotics I could somewhat control when I might get one by not slipping and eating something tasty but bad for me (like lasagna two days in a row - tomatoes bad). Add to this the fact that food in many cases takes two days to go through your system, eating a food and getting symptoms is delayed. Evacuating the food from your system would also cure the acute migraine headaches and other symptoms. With the right probiotics I can now eat all the lasagna I want and throw in blue cheese and red wine as well!
Low carb/keto also had dramatic effects on frequency of migraines/headaches for myself. CPAP however, has been even more life changing in that regard for myself. From headaches 4-7 days of the week to fewer than 1 per week.
Some confounding variables on diet/weight loss/sleep quality. But I don't care, things are better and I'm happier for it.
Did you have any side effects from the medication, or was it pretty smooth sailing?
I've been on Qulipta (a CGRP drug) daily for about a year now. It started working pretty much immediately, and I cannot think of a single side-effect in use, other than that you will have a withdrawal period pretty much immediately if you miss a dose.
Before that I've used Rizatriptan to treat rather than prevent (works well, but can cause brain fog, mood swings and GI issues). In order to get approval for the CGRP I had to try lower-cost drugs like Verapamil (a calcium channel blocker) which had no effects at all, positive or negative, and Topiramate, which is the single worst medication I've ever used. Compared to all of those, the CGRP is a miracle and has been life-changing.
There a some small side-effects with Quilipta. I was a bit low energy for a couple a weeks until my body got used to it. Also, it is a mild appetite suppressant. I seem to be able to miss doses of a day or two just fine though. Nurtec also works well for me as an accute migrate treatment.
I'm on Emgality, and haven't noticed any side effects at all.
Honestly the worst part of it has been getting special approval from insurance; sometimes they don't cover much of it but right now the manufacturer provides a savings card that brings it down to $35/month.
I got my first migraine in my early teens. I was over at a friend's house and we were playing in the basement on a summer day, then went outside where the sun reflected off a window into my eyes.
It would start with a shimmering pattern obstructing my vision where the bright light was, which would grow into a c shape and get bigger until it surrounded my vision and then faded away. About 15 min after the shimmering pattern faded the blistering pain would start and last for about 5 hours, with lingering light sensitivity until the next day.
I later realized that something about a rapid change in brightness (from dark to bright) would trigger them for me.
Another time was triggered by a high school shop teacher lighting a welding torch.
The best way to relieve the pain I found was to turn out all the lights and dunk my head in cold water, which I discovered eventually in desperation for relief.
I would only get them every few months, but when I did I would be pretty useless for most of the day. I stopped getting them in my early 20s. No idea why, but I am grateful. They sucked!
I sometimes get shimmering patterns which I think they call visual migraine or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintillating_scotoma but thankfully mine don't go on to migraine proper. They often seem set of by a bright light outside the center of vision like I'm reading a book with sunlight coming in from 45 degrees.
Exactly the same trigger here. I had one just the other day at the pub. Sitting outside, under shade, but to my left was a bright spot. It’s weird how I can sense it arriving ... something about the quality of my vision subtly changes, and there it is.
Fortunately for me it isn’t accompanied by a headache. It’s just really unsettling. At least now I’ve learned to recognise them and I just try to chill out while it does its thing.
(FWIW, also a tremendous consumer of caffeine here. But this was at 17:00, a good 5 hours after my last cup.)
For whatever it’s worth, too much caffeine and dehydration does this to me. Chugging about 48 oz of water and throwing on a face mask for 30-60 minutes usually clears it up. If I do “nothing” it takes significantly longer to clear up.
In my case it's the combination of too much caffeine, dehydration, and intense exercise where my HR maxes out. 2/3 risk factors will typically not be enough to trigger one for me. HIIT workouts and soccer have done it in the past.
The aura (with scintillating scotoma) starts coming on usually an hour or so after the exercise is done, and I know I've got about 15-20 minutes before the actual migraine hits. Got prescribed Sumatriptan and it maybe reduced the intensity by about 25%. I'll have to try the water chugging, maybe with rehydration salts to speed up absorption.
I get the same, and all of these tend to be a trigger for me too -- too much caffeine, dehydration, and rapid light intensity change (like looking outside and then back to my computer screen).
In addition to chugging water and staying in the dark with a face mask, I've found that taking raw honey right as it's coming on makes it go away rapidly.
My long term prevention is taking magnesium daily and LSD once or so a year. Once I started doing that the frequency went to almost zero, and whenever I don't do that they start up again.
I've been getting scintillating scotoma for over 50 years. They've changed character over the years from widespread fortifications to virtually no scintillation at all but always progress from a bright spot to a large blind spot to an expanding toroidal blind region with vision restored at the origin point until they pass out of my field of vision. They used to lead to headaches and sometimes speech deficits or other somatic experiences (like sizzling on my tongue and lips) but now I just get mild abdominal discomfort. With a couple of notable exceptions it lasts about an hour.
I have learned that while they're inconvenient, they're harmless and I just generally continue with whatever I was doing when they began. I have never been able to discern a trigger: they appear to come on completely randomly.
Exact same story here, including the occasional speech problem. Well, I've only been getting them for 30 years. It's always reassuring to hear this from people who have been getting them for longer than me. They used to freak me out when I was younger. Still worry me a bit when I get multiple in a single week.
I've had fewer than a dozen episodes starting last year. Luckily, like you, I have scintillating scotoma without headache. I haven't noticed a trigger--they're just spontaneous. A couple of years before, I had a couple of episodes of binocular diplopia (https://www.yalemedicine.org/conditions/double-vision). Dunno if they're related.
I used to get these two or three times a year, but then I had heart surgery last summer and had five in the first day after I came round from the anesthetic, and two or three every day for weeks after that. They've now settled down to one every few days. Annoying, but they go away fairly quickly and just leave me feeling a bit tired and headachy for a few hours.
Same story for me, had a minor ablation procedure which triggered a bunch of migraines that later settled down.
I've mentioned this before in previous HN threads about scintillating scotomas, but it's worth repeating: in my case, the issue was entirely due to excessive caffeine consumption. When I got them frequently I was sometimes consuming upwards of 450mg/day, when I cut intake way down they disappeared entirely, and when I occasionally fall off the wagon and have way too much that's when they come back.
I also discovered the dive / ice water reflex sometimes helped my migraine. The reason I tested it is because caffeine supposedly releases some chemicals related to the same chemicals that are released when you vomit. Since my migraines always ceased after vomiting, I used these other methods to induce the same chemical response in the brain.
I now keep Excedrin migraine on hand (has caffeine). However, my migraines completely ceased after I stopped using nasal steroid spray and started with an allergy nasal spray.
I underwent allergy treatment that stopped working, so I decided to try steroid medication. After about four days, I began experiencing unusual migraines every day. I had migraines before, but they always came with a headache. However, with the steroids, I started getting just very strange optic auras. Everything began to sparkle out of nowhere, becoming more intense until I had to close my eyes. The symptoms stopped once I discontinued the steroid treatment.
I'm glad you shared this - I also have light triggered migraines and I didn't realize there were so many others who also did. :) huh! I take ibuprofen and two shots of espresso and lock myself in a dark room and do deep breathing/relaxation -- the latter seems to have been surprisingly helpful for me in the last few years, and makes me wonder if my anxiety response to having the initial aura was actually contributing to worsening the migraine.
My favorite episode was when I went to my doctor, said "yeah, it's good, I haven't had a migraine for like 6 months", and as part of the physical he shined a pen light in my eyes ... and I went home and developed a migraine. sigh.
(Fortunately, some time in my 20s, I stopped getting the headache part for the most part and now just have aura -- which renders me partly unable to see, alas -- and feeling pretty off for a while.)
There are OTC meds you can buy that are marketed as "migraine relief" that are just acetaminophen + caffeine; my wife takes that and it usually works to relieve the symptoms (if she can catch it early enough).
Of course, then you take away the espresso - there's always a trade-off :)
Have you tried cold brew? It has about 10x the caffeine of an espresso shot. Espresso has the least amount of a caffeine of coffee drinks. Cold water and long exposure extracts more caffeine than hot water and short exposure. Source: I’m a coffee nerd.
The difference isn't typically that vast. At usual dilution levels, drinking a 16oz cold brew would be slight caffeine gain on the double-shot. Heat does extract caffeine better that cold, which is why the shot is prepared in ≈25 seconds and the cold brew concentrate takes 12-20 hours.
Source:10 years experience as a working barista.
Yep, I realized mine were caused by looking out the window while I brushed my teeth in the morning. One day it was really bright outside and really dark inside and the migraine started almost immediately. More than a year and I keep the blinds drawn while I'm in the bathroom in the morning and not a single migraine!
This is interesting. I frequently had them triggered by riding BART in the late afternoons in the winter, sun beating in through the dirty windows. Going through the tube (dark) and emerging in Oakland (raised track, clear view of the sky on both sides) had a double-digit % chance of giving me a migraine if my eyes were open at one point.
I can get them triggered by riding in a car in similar conditions, too, especially if the windows aren't squeaky clean. I frequently wonder why that is, something about the remaining spectrum of visible light when the windows are dirty?
Reminds me of wearing non-prescription sunglasses despite having myopia. It feels like the blurring of the world is due to the glasses, even though they're actually only blocking some of the light rather than distorting it.
Same! My understanding of migraines is that it's something to do with blood pressure in your head. My hypothesis is that the visual disturbances are your blood vessels dilating and pressing against your retina. Then I think it can cause kind of a runaway feedback loop of some sort that causes the blood pressure to increase throughout your head, causing pain.
Thinking about it now, I wonder if the light trigger could be the bright light causing minor damage to your retina, potentially triggering an inflammation/repair response. The fact that it happens when going from dark to light suddenly, also makes sense, since your pupil is at its most dilated when in the dark, meaning the most of your retina is exposed/vulnerable. That might also explain why it always starts in the periphery; because the edges of your retina are likely less often exposed to light and potentially more delicate -- but would be exposed if you see bright lights while your pupils are fully dilated.
For me, I've found it's also closely related to irregular food or sleep. And I find eating something with sugar or drinking some water can reduce the likelihood of the visual disturbances becoming a full-on migraine. My hypothesis is that these things alter your blood chemistry/physics enough to interfere with the runaway feedback loop that results in increasing blood pressure. I imagine dunking your head in cold water likewise works because it breaks the runaway process.
But this is all speculation.
Just for what it's worth, the middle third of the article is about the proposed limbic system causes of migraine.
That feels pretty similar to my story. I always put it down to some kind of puberty changes.
Yes! At least some migraines are caused by whatever second-order effect there is from hormonal changes.
I was around 13 when I had my first migraine. A solid block of pain on the right side of my head. That occasional migraine became more frequent over the years. I had a headache 24/7 in one specific place in my head.
In my early 30's, after blood tests, food elimination, x-rays and finally an MRI I was told that I had Chronic Daily Migraines.
Most days were 6-7/10 pain. Those days that were 10/10 I perfected the art of lying down and breathing in such a way that I barely moved. Noise / light were never an issue, the pain got worse when I moved.
Then I got a daith piercing.
I had read that a daith could help.
I got the daith ~14 years ago and I have not had any sort of headache since. Both my daughters who had migraines got a daith and they too have no headaches.
I get the sample size is not useful, but if you have migraines, go into your local proper piercing studio and ask for a daith - they will almost certainly reply "On which side of your head is the pain?"
Throwing in my anecdata:
I had migraines at least once every two weeks for most of my life. Nothing too out of the ordinary, just that 7/10 dull pain in the center of my head that shut me down for 5 or 6 hours.
I'm very skeptical about supposed instant fixes like this. I didn't expect it to work, but I wanted to start getting ear piercings and I figured I'd give it a shot with something not too flashy. I went with my wife to her piercing appointment and convinced them to pierce my left daith while we were already there.
That was at least seven years ago. I haven't had a migraine since. I keep assuming it's placebo and it'll wear off, but it hasn't.
If this is because of the piercing doig some vagus nerve stimulation, do you think a simple, small clip or something placed in the right position could help as well?
That I do not know.
It's worth trying but the positioning would be tricky.
All I know is as I have posted - the daith piercing stopped the pain.
Thanks anyway, I'm definitely looking into this.
Suffering from the occasional migraine myself (3-4x year) it seems a bit too drastic for myself... but my wife has very frequent migraines, anything that could possibly help is worth investigating
I got a new puppy - Dogue de Bordeaux - some months ago and she was/is on a raw food diet, so I had to get that delivered frozen.
Couple of deliveries in and I got chatting to the guy bringing the food. He mentioned he had headaches constantly. I told him about the daith.
Days later he messaged me - he'd got a daith after we talked and today, for the first time in 10+ years he woke in no pain, no need to take codeine.
Just go to a proper piercing place, not some "Claire's" type place.
Try https://safepiercing.org/ !
I've heard of this piercing so many times and always wrote it off as some mass hypnosis quick fix that would change nothing. Your comment made me reopen that box I closed years ago. I'm very curious now.
Did you get the piercing on your left or right ear?
Right ear because the pain was on the right side of my head.
Research says it's no more effective than a placebo, but hey, if it works, it works.
https://headachejournal.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
> Research says it's no more effective than a placebo, but hey, if it works, it works.
The paper you cited doesn’t say this, if anything it says the opposite. It found that it reliably works for some amount of time, but the mechanism is unclear.
“In all case studies and the retrospective study, patients reported substantial reductions in pain immediately after daith piercing; however, headache symptoms recurred several weeks to months thereafter. From the perspective of the Chinese and Western auricular systems, no sufficient explanation for the described treatment effect of daith piercing was found.”
A piercing that takes months to heal and has its own potential side effects (infection for one) does not seem worth weeks of relief after which pain returns. The authors of this study therefore do not recommend this piercing for migraines despite the transitory benefits
“current evidence does not support daith piercing for the treatment of migraine, tension-type headaches, or other headache disorders.”
That’s very different from being equivalent to placebo. And according to anecdotes in this thread, it may be permanent in some cases.
I have tried vagus nerve stimulation and it worked for about a week and then became mostly ineffective. That is consistent with this study. So, maybe try vagus nerve stimulation first and see if that works long term.
I'm willing to try it! Are you able to wear earbuds with the daith piercing? Airpods Pro are one of my most-used pieces of tech both at work live-streaming classes and at home listening to books and music.
Yes!
I have worn various and my current are Airpods 2 Pro.
The daith is discreet, does not get in the way of anything.
What about wearing a winter hat? I was considering getting one for the exact reasons as you, but I live in a pretty cold area and not being able to wear a hat for 6 months during its healing process is unfortunately a dealbreaker.
Unless the hat has a hard edge which sits right on top of the piercing you should be fine.
truly fascinating comment..... will have to research this further!
fascinating, thanks for sharing
I started having migraines at 8 years of age, several a week. This persisted all through my life till 42 years later, I had a blood pressure emergency where I ended up in ER with 190/100 blood pressure. Thankfully, it never repeated and was never diagnosed but as a consequence I was put on Olmesartan, a blood pressure medication that relaxes the blood vessels. Eventually, the dose was reduced to the lowest, 5mg, once a day, to which I added 240mg magnesium glycinate, which they sell in Costco. I have been mostly migraine free since for several years and ones I do get are mild compared to before.
My cardiologist, who prescribed the blood pressure medication, is mystified saying that while beta blockers are a migraine prevention medication, olmesartan isn't a beta blocker and maybe it was just my (mild) hypertension which needed to be treated. I doubt that I had hypertension when I was 8 but I'm just thankful that decades of pain have come to an end.
Hmm, I was prescribed Verapamil (calcium channel blocker, also a blood pressure medication), and they helped reduce the severity of my migraines with aura for a while. I eventually went off it, and haven't had near as many since. Early twenties was so awful for those migraines.
Did you find Verapamil had any mood altering or cognitive properties for you? I take it for migraines. I think it makes me a little more emotionally stable but a tiny bit slower cognitively, especially in the mornings. It's a good trade off, especially in light of how it basically stopped my migraines, but it's one I have perceived.
I'm on a sartan and my migraine doctor thought it might help.
Candesartan has been massively helpful and has very mild side effects compared to beta blockers like metoprolol.
Migraines are the absolute worst. On average I would get 6-8 a year. My triggers are primarily not eating frequently enough, bright lights and constant loud sounds. Knowing that, I mostly am able to avoid them and I can usually tell early enough when one is coming on to course correct. I never really explored any medication with my doctor because it was infrequent enough that I didn't really think of it. Then I had the worst migraine of my life. Typically I would vomit some as it starts to get really bad. Usually at that time I'm already laying on the bathroom floor because there are no lights of any kind in my bathroom that aren't tied to the switch. Also I rapidly alternate between being freezing cold and burning up so the cold floor is ideal (I also bring a blanket.) If it has hit this point I'm often in there for 4-6 hours before I can at least move to the bedroom.
The worst one, however, I spent 8 hours in the bathroom and for that entire 8 hours I never stopped vomiting. Well, I did, but only because there was nothing left inside of me. Dry heaving for that amount of time is not fun and it is even worse when combined with the terrible pain of the migraine. I never want to have that happen again. I genuinely don't know how people who get Migraines once a week or even more often can do it. If I got migraines like that every few days I would have blown my brains out a long time ago.
I try to avoid my triggers as best as possible but I was also prescribed sumatriptan as a last resort to take if I know it is going to hit. It has its own side effects that suck but it sucks a lot less than the migraine it prevents.
I was diagnosed with migraine as a kid when I was 10. The doctor made me undergo a battery of tests including a contrast CT scan that consumed aj entire day, only to confirm at the end of the day that it was migraine. The migraines weren't even that debilitating but my mom was just being extra careful.
After that, I still got headaches at a good frequency and tried all sorts of specialists from orthos to opthalmologists, all of who checked their areas of the body and said I was perfectly normal. The one doc I didn't see was a gastro and this was a mistake.
Eventually I grew older and realised first that my headaches were always preceded by some sinus congestion and milk was a trigger of said congestion. So I switched to lactose free milk and that helped.
Eventually I realised that I was a chronic acid reflux patient, that a lot of small symptoms I had had over the years (a feeling of something stuck in the throat, congestion etc) were basically just the gut throwing up acid, or more accurately LPR/silent reflux. The reflux was the actual trigger of my headache. So my usual medication of Paracetamol, or worse, ibuprofen was actually making it worse in the medium/long term.
I switched my strategies to fixing the gut/acid reflux instead of treating the headache. The max I do nowadays is 325mg of paracetamol if I need to sleep and the pain doesn't let me. Ibuprofen is a nuclear option that I haven't resorted to in years.
The gut issue is still not resolved, I suppose years of damage to the oesophagus takes time to heal, so I'm still prone to reflux but I make do with a bland diet, avoiding triggers like milk and resorting to PPIs for short bursts during an attack. Oh and I also do the bending while swallowing trick that was on HN sometime back, which has helped immensely.
My headaches are mostly a thing of the past. Haven't had a debilitating one in years.
Gerd and the like are sometimes caused by too little acid. Maybe your GP can discuss HCl pills to take if you feel a flare up coming?
I only get bad reflux a few times a year and I use baking soda, so I never think to buy HCl at a pharmacy.
Best of luck.
But baking soda is basic while HCl would be acidic?
> I also do the bending while swallowing trick that was on HN sometime back
Could you share the link for this, if you can find it?
Dont have the hn discussion link, but it was this paper that was posted.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9106553/
Yes it's this one.
I spent most of my life thinking "migraine" was just a really bad headache. Until I started getting migraines. The best way to describe it is a band of white hot pain, almost a stabbing sensation. It started behind the eyes and would spread everywhere. Not confined to my head, a full-on nervous system meltdown: extreme light sensitivity, blurred vision, trouble with balance and coordination, nausea, numbness, and residual effects that lasted over a day. With a migraine, there is no "take an advil and power through" - you sit in a dark room and pray.
Any other migraineurs share what I call "Silver Bullet Fatigue" at trying new treatments? I've been at this for six decades with no magic solution for my own migraine problems, and I've lost count of all the neurological investigations, meds, scans, treatments, and helpful or sometimes utterly silly suggestions that have come up short over the years. Some have come close but had undesireable side effects, others made me very ill in their own right. At this point I just don't have much desire to go through the treatment wringer again. Am I alone in this sort of fatigue?
Hey. I am not a migraine guy but a paroxysmal, full-body, painful hives type of guy. Like some migraine people, my symptoms eventually stopped happening after trying all sorts of things for years, and I can't say precisely what the "cure" really was. Or if I am not just in a 7-year-long remission.
Anyway, I experienced this fatigue you speak of. I am not sure this will help you since your fatigue appears to come from blood tests/medical treatments, but hopefully it helps somebody. What helped was when the suggestion was something I could do that was healthier/cheaper/more beneficial than what I was currently doing, I would frame it as, "This might not fix my debilitating problem, but it will improve my life in some way. So, worst case scenario, I'm in the green."
Examples (I am not suggesting these as migraine silver bullets, but I am trying to clarify what I mean):
- Someone in this thread mentioned cutting out xanthan gum and other thickening agents has helped. Will that cure you? Probably not. Is it a healthy lifestyle change? Probably. Why not try?
- I cut out processed food, which helped me realize that I was eating 1-3 frozen Trader Joe's meals per day. - I got an air quality monitor that made me realize the brain fog I felt at night was due to worsening air quality in my home. - I switched to unscented soap and laundry detergent, which was cheaper. (Artificial laundry scent now smells sickly and synthetic to me, which may be a downside.) - I set up reminders for change-by dates for furnace/car filters, vacuuming, dusting etc.
I don't know if any of this is why I don't experience symptoms anymore, but I don't regret any of it, and have long-term positive effects regardless.
Lastly, after several creams & allergy pills, I stopped getting my hopes up that anything would fix me. Expectation management is essential for avoiding fatigue.
Hope this helps you or somebody else. I am sorry you have suffered for so long.
Last spring, I broke my ankle severely (trimalleolar fracture with dislocation). I had a very long string of complications following that: fracture blisters, nerve block rebound pain, opioid withdrawal, atrophy, infections, nerve pain, bone fragments, etc. It seems that right when things seem to start going well, a new complication arises.
I know it's not rational, but it's really hard to not fall into a mindset of "Why even try to fix this one, another one's going to happen anyway?" And once I start letting myself believe that, I just feel even worse.
Even before this happened, I have had a pet theory that agency (and perceived agency) is one of the most central components of psychology around anxiety and depression. This whole experience has reinforced it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
> I have had a pet theory that agency (and perceived agency) is one of the most central components of psychology around anxiety and depression
I like to think of that quality as being a person with a willing desire to be a player on the team trying to solve the health problem, in that I am generally a sunshine-y person and try to see the best in things. To me, that's the key to avoiding despair in facing my chronic, acute migraines. Having said that, it is fatiguing to face batteries of tests once again. If the science is very compelling, I'll consider it.
I'm like this with back pain. I just reminisced the other day about when I was a teen I could straddle on a brick wall and pull with my arms to twist my torso around my hips and just pop the f out of my lower back and hips, then I could stretch and move normally again.
This worked for like 2 months. I've tried tiger balm, tens, chiro, heat, cold, exercise, every medicine.
I have theracane, davinci back tool, and a long suffering wife who will stand on my back to put enough pressure on the muscles to help.
Tumeric, CBD. 7-hydroxymatiglynine nullifies the pain but I puke 60% of the time I take it, about 4 hours later.
Mostly I just lay very still and whimper.
For what it’s worth, I got a sleep study and a CPAP machine due to borderline hypertension, coincidentally also stopped taking my migraine prevention medication, and I haven’t had a single migraine since, a year and a few months later. Maybe like half of one, one time. Blood pressure is also back to normal.
In my case CGRP agonists made me feel absolutely horrible and actually gave me long-lasting gut trouble that I am still struggling with.
No. I read a migraine book which boiled down to once you figure it out, your migraines change. Meds stop working, life changes, stress, etc. I routinely get month long migraines over the years. I’ve had all the scans, Mayo Clinic visits, eyes checked, and follow-ups.
They say it’s helpful to log things or journal but I don’t feel like it much with a migraine and blurred/double vision.
CGRP blockers (specifically Nurtec) were practically a silver bullet for me, but unfortunately not for everyone.
First, I know different people have different triggers from me. I used to have migraines every few days to every few months from age 13 to 23. These would incapacitate me. I would get the aura and be almost blind for an hour, then throw up a couple times, and have a bad headache for 2-4 hours, then I could function again but still felt crummy for the next 24 hours. I noticed that pickles were a trigger, and I thought "pickles have a lot of sodium". So, out of desperation as something to try, I read the labels of everything I was eating and cut out everything that had more than a little sodium: frozen pizza, frozen dinners, deli meats, etc. At the time I was having migraines every few days, and then I didn't have another migraine for years. I was so glad they stopped. I now doubt it was the sodium. In cutting out sodium, I happen to cut out processed foods, which includes lots of suspicious ingredients. I suspect Tyramine was the main culprit. There's a diet called The Headache Diet that is focused on minimizing Tyramine. Guess what else pickles have a lot of? For last last 30 years, here are all the things that have caused my migraines: Lithium Carbonate (Orotate is OK), Pickled Herring (Tyramine), Soy Sauce (Tyramine), Hyaluronic Acid (synthetic, Mobilee is OK), Tianeptine, Sulbutiamine, and a strobe light. Every migraine I have had in the last 30 years can be explained by those - only 8-12 migraines total. I still precisely control my sodium and eat no processed foods.
I too had nausea, auras with migraines when I was a teen. I think I outgrew them. That or it was my girlfriend at the time (I was about 20) that gave would snap my neck — like some kind of self-taught chiropractor.
I have been a migraineur for decades. Mine are classic aura, with the whole "looking through broken glass" thing for a half hour or so when they happen. This year one of my partner's doctors mentioned positive results from supplementing with Vitamin B-2 and Coenzyme Q10, and it has dramatcially lowered their frequency. Mine are especially bad when the air pressure is seesawing which it does a lot here in the spring and fall, but I would guess I'm down to something like 20% of the previous years numbers.
Definitely worth trying.
> "looking through broken glass"
I think we have similar symptoms, but I have no headache, just the "broken glass" that passes over my vision. Usually takes about 15 mins to half an hour or so to pass.
This is the best visual representation that I have found of it ove the years:
https://imgur.com/gallery/kY0I0Ht
The one aspect this misses that's so hard to communicate is the lack of visual processing inside the sort of curled aura "area". When I was getting them often as a kid, I would basically become illiterate over the course of 15minutes, because anything in that shimmering area was not parseable. I could SEE the shape of a letter, but I couldn't read the word. That shimmering area grows and grows till it's covering all of your vision, but near the start you can still read out of one side.
It was by far, the part of migraines I hated the most as a kid because it took intense pain that people assume you're overblowing, and prefaced it with 30-45 minutes of people thinking I was an idiot/doing some weird awkward joke. (Or having a stroke! The dread of not being able to speak correctly, not being able to read, a slow pain in my temple getting stronger and stronger, and now the teacher is calling 911 while the class starts screaming.)
I used to get typical migraines, starting around junior year of high school. One every 6-18 months, usually, for years. Visual auras for twenty or thirty minutes, then a few hours of bad headache.
Over the years the frequency has swung toward the longer end of that, and now the last three times I haven’t gotten the headache part at all, but other weird symptoms. One time, bad tunnel vision for a while and then feeling like I had to go to sleep immediately. Another, just a weird disconnected/disembodied feeling for a couple hours. The most recent, I got fairly bad aphasia for ten or fifteen minutes, which is the fist time anything like that’s happened to me. Not just trouble thinking of words, though that too, but knowing the word I wanted to say and having something else come out instead, no matter how many times I tried.
Migraines are weird.
Have you tried a sumatriptan as soon as the aura starts? Works for me. YMMV.
I haven’t tried anything but excedrine migraine. If I still got a couple a year and they still gave me like 6 hours of killer headaches, I’d probably look into something like that, but the frequency’s been closer to every other year than twice a year and I don’t get much pain with them now, so I’ve not bothered.
Maybe I should, though, given the other comments in this thread about them causing brain lesions…
Got this exact thing once last year a few months after recovering from a very bizarre and severe viral infection that ended with about 2 weeks of bells balsy.
It was bizarre. No headache at all. And unlike other posters here, I could still read easily.
I think I had Parvo, no idea for sure tho
Yes that's silent migraine with aura, you experience the visual effects but not the headache. It's rare but happens for some people.
The representation is really good in my opinion! Gives me flashbacks.
I suppose an even better one would be "looking through broken glass that keeps fucking moving around".
The weirdest thing I discovered was that, back when I juggled professionally, I couldn't read at all during that aura but could still juggle, even hard things like 5+ balls. Strangely it did not screw up peripheral vision.
Worst time was when it came on before a music school performance. Not a hope in hell of keeping track of which line the little circles were on...
Ah yes, that visual is perfect. I showed something similar to a friend a long time ago and they said 'that's migraine? i have that every few weeks but not much else so never thought much of it; i thought migraines meant headaches'.
Just want to second this. I was getting migraines every 2 weeks (visual auras, thumping headache for 3-6 hours etc) mainly triggered by stress & lack of sleep as far as I could tell. Started taking Vitamin B and I haven't had a migraine since - for over a year).
There is research to back this up as well: - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33779525/ - Conclusion: Vitamin B2 400 mg/day significantly reduced the duration, frequency, and pain score of migraine attacks.
I've tried not CoQ10 and high doses of B2, without any impact on my aura frequency or duration. Migraine auras are such a pesky thing which medical science clearly doesn't understand. The typical migraine drugs like triptans are useless for auras, since the drugs typically take longer to kick in that the duration of the aura.
Glad to hear the supplements are working. And you get to impress peope with the colour of your pee!
There seems to be a link between migraines and Mithocondrial Disease. If frequency/intensity of migraines diminishes with Vitamin B and Q10, it may be worth investigating. Especially if you have muscular fatigue or exhaustion.
I have been diagnosed with vestibular migraines. No pain, just dizziness and brain fog and vision issues (feels like my eyes don’t point in the same direction). I also have a doctor that says I have symptoms of mold exposure (lots of correlative testing and also house testing and remediation). I have also been diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy by my neurologist, but my mold doctor says that is consistent with mold exposure. I also have a vestibular degradation, one side of my balance center is damaged. I think all of it is related and linked by inflammation. I do think that mold is part of the story, but definitely not all of it. Anti seizure medication helps a lot. Ubrelvy (a gepants) also helps a lot. Getting the right kind of sleep and exercise and staying hydrated also all help. I am nearly 50 and this a new thing that has happened in the last 2-3 years. Was not fun to go through this on the tail end of running a startup. The brain fog was debilitating. I am now 80% better with meds (and a shit ton of supplements) but still on the journey to figure out how to get back to normal and off all the meds. I do think it is inflammation related but it could be one of a zillion things, or a combination of many.
Wife has been struggling with vestibular migraines for about 20 years. It really came to a head about 5 years ago, and we spent the following three years seeing specialist after specialist and trying around a dozen different medications. During this time she had daily flare-ups and missed a lot of work and spent most days in bed or on the couch.
What ended up working in the end? We finally got into Mayo, and they suggested an SSRI (at a fairly high dose). She also figured out that she has a few food triggers (yogurt and freshly baked bread are 2 bad ones). She also discovered she has double vision, and now wears prism glasses. We think the combination of double vision and whatever brain chemistry imbalance she had was "overloading" her vision and vestibular systems, and she would basically just shut down. Treating both of those seems to have (mostly) alleviated things for her.
I completely understand what you've gone though and how frustrating it is, especially given the very vague criteria for diagnosing and treating vestibular migraine.
Have you tried vestibular rehab? Essentially a series of eye tracking + neck mobility exercises that support the visual and vestibular system.
Yes. A lot of it. It was maybe 10% effective at best.
The way one ENT described it, I have 40% degradation on one side. If it’s constant, your brain adjusts and you are essentially ok. If something happens to vary that then your brain can’t adjust. My theory is that you add inflammation or migraines or epilepsy or all of it and the brain can’t compensate.
I used to have very many (multiple a week) and was under specialist care for it in my 20s. Turned out to be stress though (doctors didn't buy this but couldn't find any other reason either, but once I stopped going to the office, I have had 0; I stopped going 25 years ago and had 0 for 25 years). I found what killed them almost immediately; 1 shot of vodka. When I saw the lines and the auras starting to come (usually tunnelvision and some vague jagged lines would announce an oncoming attack), I would immediately knock down 1 shot of vodka and it would go away while just causing a slight headache, but none of the rest of the very bad things I would otherwise have like double vision, splitting cluster headaches, auditory features, dizziness and tingling in my face, some of that lasting for days. I would all skip that with 1 shot. Just not having them is nicer though; whatever helped, I am very happy I discovered it relatively early on.
Hello, fellow migraine sufferers. I sincerely want you to read the fantastic essay "In Bed" by Joan Didion. It is a fantastic reflection on what it is like to have migraines and it makes me cry every time I read it because it makes me feel seen and understood.
"For I had no brain tumor, no eyestrain, no high blood pressure, nothing wrong with me at all: I simply had migraine headaches, and migraine headaches were, as everyone who did not have them knew, imaginary."
Read it; it's a google search away. You'll thank me.
I read a book a while ago. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name (maybe AI can find it), but the premise was based on a metaphor: there are multiple hot air balloons that, together, affect the chance/severity of a migraine. Something like food, sleep, stress, hydration, and one more. One of these "balloons" filling up may be enough to trigger a migraine, while all of them partially filling up can also trigger a migraine.
Sorry for the rough recall, but the point is that there may not be a silver bullet solution simply because it's not one thing contributing all of the time. I can trigger on all four of the ones I listed. I've had migraines for a week straight now because I recently developed tinnitus and am struggling to sleep. However, I had a migraine the week before because I inadvertently consumed red dye, which triggered massive inflammation in my body.
So, for me, it's all about managing multiple things enough to not get above the threshold.
A metaphor I heard once, second hand from a neurologist, was that of making a stress stew. You add in the elements slowly over time into the pot -- barometric pressure, painful perfumes, an odd sleeping position, some traffic, marital issues, whatever -- and then at some ill-defined point it crosses a threshold into being a proper stress stew (ie a migraine).
I don’t think this is the same book but it is similar in its thinking: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0761125663?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_...
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If you've suffered, seek a current expert (e.g., a neurologist migraine specialist who has recently completed training).
The newer CGRP inhibitors have been highly effective, but that also has made some specialists grow stale in their assessment skills.
Pain is emotionally debilitating, but sorting out complex chronic migraines takes persistence, patience, and an excellent diagnostician. It can take a few long-term trials of treatment and environmental/behavior changes. Be a good patient: bring accurate contemporaneous journals and openness to new suggestions, and stick with an agreed regime pending re-evaluation. Above all, don't just try to power through or mask the pain.
I tried to find this advice in the thread but couldn’t, and I’m surprised since it’s surprisingly common!
Some sweeteners such as aspartame can trigger migraines (also some gut issues) depending on the quantity and person. While most of the people can take them just fine in principle, others suffer migraines a while after taking them. In my case, this was a relative who suffered a lot until finding out by pure chance that certain sweeteners where the reason, but you can find countless cases.
When I was a child I couldn't drink diet soda and then go play outside during the summer, I'd get a wicked headache. I've never had a migraine, based on the descriptions I've heard.
> When May started researching migraine in the 1990s, the leading hypotheses were that migraine was either a psychological issue or a vascular headache disorder, with throbbing pain caused by dilation of blood vessels. The psychological associations came with stigma, May says. [...] A lot changed in the 1990s, when May and others began conducting brain scans of people with migraine.
Sure, who the hell is this guy, and his discovery of the cortical spreading depression phenomenon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristides_Le%C3%A3o
I've thought for a long time now that everyone has a migraine all the time, but migraine sufferers temporarily lack the brain's ability to ignore the ever-present pain.
In other words, the migraine isn't the addition of pain, but the absense of a pain relief mechanism. I have no sources to back this up, other than personal observation.
That doesn't explain the auras.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aura_(symptom)
I got told that it could be indeed the case that my brain continuously has small seizures but only from time to time they break trough and cause the pain and auras which I would then experience. They wanted to measure the brainwaves to figure out if that was the case. That would also somehow fit what OP said, so I guess this is known in the medical world already. Or at least something in that direction.
Only that's not how auras seem to work. The current understanding is that they are caused by cortical spreading depression - a slow travelling wave which depolarizes the brain cells it passes through. These don't just happen randomly in healthy controls.
Well, I think the Auras is my brain failing to filter out visual noise, which then get's into a feedback loop and builds up. And that might be related to other filter functions failing. I think that, becaus4 once in a while, I'm able to suppress the Aura conciously, when it is still very small.
Some auras have a musculo-skeletal origin. For example, some neck issue irritates a nerve or alters the pressure in a blood vessel, which in turn affects the optic nerve.
I have suffered them myself, and they always came in a sequence: arm pain, neck pain, headache and aura. Finally, I'd release tension in my neck and it'd be gone.
My doctor confirmed injuries in cervical discs also seem to be causally linked to auras, but there might be other causes as well.
What personal observation makes you think everybody has a migraine all the time?
The pounding pain that corresponds with heartbeat. It makes me think there are nerves that register this all the time but there's some part of the nervous system that filters that signal out.
If you have pounding pain from heartbeat, you should go see a doctor. That is not normal.
One feature of migraines is not just a headache. Some people can feel it coming, called the aura. I feel weird during and after the headache. I frequently get the migraine weird feeling without the headache, so-called silent migraine. Migraines and normal headaches feel different.
I would suspect it is increased blood flow.
That's why you get a headache from caffeine withdrawal at least, because the blood flow to your brain increases and you then feel the pounding.
Also tinnitus is said to always be present but the brain can fail to filter it sometimes.
Like right now for me wtf
I always feel a bit weird when reading migraine threads on the internet, because mine seem so much milder, but it's still debilitating. I remember first noticing the migraines in grade when I was 16, but it took me years before realizing they were migraines. I thought that most people had pain like I did, and just powered through with some Advil/Tylenol.
My migraines follow a very regular schedule. I wake up and just know that I will have a migraine. It's like a nagging thought. Worse after days of poor/little sleep, or days where the temperature changes dramatically, or if there is a big storm. At around 14:00 the pain grows in intensity, I feel nauseous and uncoordinated, very sensitive to light. Lying in a dark room and listening to a podcast/YouTube video is the best way to get through this period, I can get to the edge of sleep and it makes it easier. At around 20:00 the pain has usually mostly subsided, and by 22:00 I'm pain free but exhausted.
I tried a few prescription medications after talking with a doctor, but they didn't have much of an effect, so I just accepted that once every 1/2 weeks I would have to deal with it. Whenever I would read about migraines online, I would feel relieved, because mine seemed so much more mild. No aura, the pain is usually gone within a day, and if I needed to be out and about I could manage, even though it was painful.
About 5 years ago an ex-partner offered me a Bufferin (Aspirin mix), and right away it helped with the symptoms. Read into it and saw a study that suggested some people respond well to high-doses of aspirin and caffeine for migraine relief. It worked exceptionally well for me. 9/10 migraines knocked out immediately, with the rest being substantially reduced in length and intensity. I get maybe 1 migraine a year now that is truly bad.
Recently talked to a new doctor who prescribed me propanolol (he was afraid about the high dose of aspirin on my stomach), and it's been just as good.
I just feel fortunate to have easy access to migraine relief, and I hope that others are able to find something that works for them as well.
I think my biggest trigger is changing weather. I usually attribute this to changing light levels but I'm not sure.
I spent about 30 years getting migraines before I realized that wearing sunglasses helps my light sensitivity. It seems like that'd be a fairly intuitive thing to have tried, but somehow I never did.
> Migraine can even drive full-blown visual hallucinations similar to the ‘reflections of the living light’ painted by Hildegard von Bingen, a twelfth-century abbess who was thought to have experienced a condition that is now called migraine with aura.
I don't think the aura effects are usually considered hallucinations?
I get mild migraines sometimes, with hardly noticeable headache, but with aura. In a way, it's pretty cool. You can directly perceive the abnormal brain activity and how it develops in real time. (I get the classic zigzag lines wandering across the field of vision.)
I also have migraine with aura. There are visual effects but also when I am looking into the mirror I can't see half of my face and give this is a wrong perception of reality you might consider it a hallucination?
When I have aura it's always morbidly fascinating to me how a part of my vision is not black, but it's just "missing"
Same, the fortification aura is really kind of amazing, putting aside the debilitating pain that's quickly approaching. It's really weird to have a part of your vision just "not there" as opposed to being black. It's even stranger when looking at a face or some recognizable object, and half of it disappears into nothingness while the other half still exists. Fun to play with.
the first time i had this, everyone's nose was missing. for ten seconds it was funny and then i hid in a bathroom stall at work, and texted my wife goodbye. i was positive i was about to die. its really stressful to have bodies.
my mom used to get these and said it was like "seeing dots"
anecdotally of course too, but is it more common for women? I've only ever known 3-4 people that got these kinds of migraines and they were all women.
I happen to be a man who gets migraines with aura, but I do think they’re more common in women. They started when I was 14.
I get visual issues like tunnel vision and sparklies, but I also get numbness in my face and extremities, confuse my words (right parts of speech, not what I intend to say), and often vomit.
Needless to say, the first one scared the crap out of my mother and I.
I may or may not have a headache when this happens.
Neat, eh? I was talking to a guy who suffered from seizures in college, and apparently his “aura” is very similar, and I've always wondered if there was some connection since my father also suffers from epilepsy.
> I get visual issues like tunnel vision and sparklies, but I also get numbness in my face and extremities, confuse my words (right parts of speech, not what I intend to say), and often vomit.
I’ve experienced migraines for years, but last year had my first instance that messed with speech. It certainly unsettled the friend I was with at the time.
Migraines and epilepsy have a lot in common, including some symptoms and triggers. Drugs and things that lower seizure threshold also tend to cause migraines. Some epilepsy drugs also act as migraine prophylactics.
I'm male and I get visual auras with migraines (not often, only once or twice a year). It's like a small area of old TV static or (as I call them) "dead pixels" in my vision. It's usually centered right in the middle of my vision, so reading becomes impossible but I could do something else.
It usually spreads a little bit before dissipating. They can happen with or before the actual migraine pain.
I sometimes but not always get an aura before a migraine.
Which was pretty fun the first time i got an aura, as i was working in a chemistry lab. I described what was happening (loss of vision, flashes of light, rapidly oscillating black and white patterns) to this greybeard lab technician and within 5 minutes the entire lab was evacuated, out of fear of some weird chemical poisoning us all.
Yes, its much more common for women, its rare for men.
AI hype terminology? Should be a visual effect.
Hallucination is a medical term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination
The usage in relation to AI is a reference to the medical term, not the other way around.
I tend to get migraines occasionally. For me the trigger is stress. So if I can try to avoid stress, I wouldn't get migraines as quickly. Sadly, in modern life it's sometimes hard to avoid stress.
Maybe 5 years ago, to treat my migraines, my girlfriend advices me to visit a massage therapist in Pattaya, as he's helped many people, Thai and foreigner, to get rid of migraines. I had a message session at his shop (including a lot of neck and head massages) and he gave me some herbal medicine to eat for 1 or 2 months. Afterwards, didn't have migraines for a couple of years. But the migraines came back, I think about 2 years ago. I might visit the message therapist again in the future if we plan to visit Pattaya (we live in Chiang Mai province, so it's like 800 km away).
I know of a girl in our village who also had a lot of migraines. She visited some kind of Chinese medicine doctor in Chiang Mai. He made some small holes in the head, blood would go outside. Not sure how many sessions the girl got, but from my understanding her migraines are gone now.
My migraines are usually as follows:
- usually lasts for around a day
- sometimes one side of the brain (temple area) is very painful (like a drill inside), sometimes both sides
- arteries around the area in brain where is pain are visibly thick
- pain in head & neck area, not so much in rest of body
- sensitive to light
Showering in hot water helps relieve the pain a bit, my guess is because it might improve blood flow. I tend to take hot showers a couple of times a day during migraine attacks.
Other things that seem to relieve a bit are ginger tea (fresh ginger), tiger balm on pain area in head & head and neck messages.
I have also noticed that for some reason hot showers and also shoulder and head massage help seem to help a lot, but only about as long as I am in the shower or have the massage. And also putting Vicks VapoRub on scalp seems to help a lot, but it is quite messy. However, a triptan medication I have started to use recently, seems to help even more.
After checking on my migraine with aura by doing a MRI they found a large AVM in my brain which could kill me any time.
So if you get the chance, take an brain MRI. You never know what they might find.
As someone who deals with migraines, this article really hits home. I'm glad there's progress being made, but it’s also a bit disheartening to see how much we still don't know
I started having migraines in my late teens after drinking too much alcohol at parties, I used to think they were hangovers. It was only much later, after getting migraines in daily life, I found out after visiting a neurologist that those hangovers were migraines. Been having frequent migraines ever since, most of the time triggered by stress. Often I'd have attacks 3-4 times a week, fortunately the intensity is not crippling, more like a 6-7 out of 10. And now the good part, I have been supplementing Omega 3 and Magnesium during the last couple of months and haven't had a severe attack since. It's worth trying out if you suffer frequent attacks like I did.
edit: my experience with sumatriptan, is that it helps stave off an attack, but frequent use increased the frequency of my attacks, leading to almost daily attacks, so I stopped taking it.
Just so people are aware there are several types of magnesium supplements and they all do different things. One of them is for relieving constipation and will not help with migraines, probably.
For instance I've recently started trying magnesium glycinate as a sleep aid.
Anyhow I don't know which is which so I look it up.
It's glycinate too.
thank you so much. now i just need to track down which magnesium of the 4 dozen you're supposed to supplement to help vitamin D do its job. My research on stuff like this is slow going because i always get nerd-sniped by the mechanics of the minerals and metals in our bodies.
As someone with a traumatic brain injury, I get a lot of migraines. My favorite piece of advice from a doctor? 'Allow yourself to relax'.......sure.....that's the issue.....
Reading this as I'm just coming down from a migraine. I've been getting them since I was a young teen. I get migraines with aura. They used to last for hours. Sometimes I get them multiple times per week, then they disappear for months/years and suddenly will get them again. No significant life or dietary changes in between. I've never been able to pin down what causes them.
These days they've become much more manageable. The aura and headache part takes 30-60 minutes as opposed to 5+ hours when I was a teen. I do experience brainfog, fatigue, dizzyness and nausea for 24+ hours afterwards, but at least I'm not stuck under the covers for hours.
To hell with the drugs that they throw at you for headaches. It's your diet, lifestyle and poor sleep that's drives this bus.
I'll save you 10 years of my suffering and the awful side effects induced from the cocktail of drugs in this article and say I've reversed cluster headaches and can now tell when anything is not good for my body goes into it.
I did an elimination diet, I skip breakfast usually, and did 1 successful session of hyperbaric oxyegen treatment and it's completely changed my life.
Ive been able to continue ketosis periodically and am adding foods back now 1 by 1 to see what induces pain and believe it or not your body will tell you.
My latest revelation was legumes which tricks you, high in carb item that apparently is a different type of carb that doesn't digest in the bottom of your gut like other carbs. (1)
This list of positive side effects can only seen as a miracle to me from being on the edge of survival (my clusters were headed towards a manic state)
-I don't get down and cynical at all like I used to -my daily energy is a magnitude of about 5x stronger -confidence and positivity are the first reactions i have now so it's greatly uplifted everyone around me - there is a level of even keel rationality that I have now that I've never ever had - just alot more calmer overall and easier to get the busy mind not to overworry
I've tried many drugs and techniques but everything felt like a bandaid on the problem and not actually addressing it
Big and large psychedelic doses, triptans, cgrp, mood stabilizers, steroids. If they had it i tried it.
It took about 1 month of major diet changes to start feeling better. A year in now and the two things that feel the worst for setting off mild nero inflamation are 1-not getting good sleep and 2-eating highly processed foods
Your mileage may vary, everyone reacts to food differently.
1 - https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3...
As someone who has healed from some weird conditions by doing what you suggest (specially diet), I would be cautious about implying that everyone else is on the same path. Some people may have excellent diets and sleep schedules but still suffer from migraines or other debilitating conditions.
While I agree that lifestyle factors are often overlooked, especially in the West where we tend to medicalize every symptom, sometimes the root cause of the issue remains unknown. Suggesting that it's always due to something like not following a proper diet can be harmful.
Exactly.
I run or cycle daily and do small triathlons / half marathons in the summer. I’m mostly vegetarian. I weigh 155 lbs and I’m 5’11”. I sleep fine.
I get random severe migraines 2-3 times a year.
I discovered sumatriptan. It stops the migraine almost instantly when i sense one coming on (my vision starts to “fuzz out”).
Before this I would lose a day recovering in a dark room lying down. I was scared whenever I backpacked or went on long trips that I would have a migraine at the wrong time. Sumatriptan freed me from this.
I’m glad OP found a cure that works for them but everyone is different.
Another factor is that there are bunch of foods that are common migraine triggers. It is possible that he cut out his triggers with a limited diet.
For me, triggers include alcohol, chocolate, processed meats, fermented and pickled food, and hops.
I am suffering from migraine since 20 years and it's really painful. In 20 years, the only causes that I can infer are sleep deprivation and weekend.
I found some relief with acupuncture: a bench of sessions of acupuncture reduce the intensity and increase the distance between two attacks. In the last years I was prescribed triptanes and they are very effective to me, but I feel "strange" when I get them.
> “I used to think that disability travels with pain, and it’s only when the pain gets severe that people are impaired. That’s not only false, but we have treatments to do something about it,” says Richard Lipton, a neurologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.
Am I the only one unable to grok this statement?
He's saying that he used to just view the pain of migraines as a disability, but now realizes that there are other components to migraines besides pain that cause disability (such as brain fog, emotional instability, blindness, etc)
Thank you, that makes more sense now; with that explanation I can re-read the original quotes.
I think "travels with" is an odd phrasing that distracts from the meaning of the sentence. It took me a while to parse as well.
Right- even though I was able to figure that bit out on second or third reading, it threw me enough that the second clause didn't truly make sense. Also, the subjects of "That's not only false" and "to do something about it" are _different_. So my train of thought kept derailing.
And this is for a native english speaker!
Magnesium L-Threonate changed my life. I no longer experience headaches daily.
Yes! I’m a 50+ woman diagnosed as a teenager, and daily magnesium changed my life. I rarely get a migraine these days, and I’m glad to hear it’s effective for others.
If this ever stops working for you, try one of the magnesium mixes like MagTech.
Anti-CGRP medicines are life changing.
The only medicine I’ve used that has all but completely eliminated my migraines during usage (Aimovig).
Unfortunately, to get these — you have to provide an arm and a leg to insurance, even when a neurologist is vouching for you.
Nothing makes me consider violence more than meeting with a highly educated, vetted, practitioner of medicine — having a conclusive conversation about a treatment plan, and then having my fucking insurance say “ope, sorry — you have to prove you need this medicine by trying anti-depressants (which might incidentally help, but not designed for migraines), or this other thing which also may incidentally help (but not designed for migraines)”
Get this — I got a prescription for Aimovig, all positive results (for a year and a half) and my insurance is still getting in the way of fulfilling the script (each month). If I miss the dose, I get a massive rebound migraine — and I’ve missed several doses because my insurance wants to send another letter to my neuro “hey are you claiming this is still worth it?”
What does one do here? Lawyer up?
I recall about 10 or 15 years ago at work in the lunchroom it was me and maybe six younger people. Me age 40 them about age 20 six all said they have migraines I didn't, didn't know anyone who did. It seemed odd so many claimed to have migraines. I assumed they meant a bad headache not actual migraines but were using the term migraine to mean a bad headache.
Just a note to say I noticed this, too.
Kids these days.
I have experienced migraines since my teens, usually starting with annoying visual artifacts, facial numbness, difficulty speaking, and progressing to intense pain. The worst of them would also cause auditory discomfort. In my 20s, I could reliably trigger a migraine by doing something intensely physical (like playing basketball with friends) and drinking lots of cold water or taking a cool shower. Since then, it's been harder to determine a cause other than stress. About 15 years ago, work was really stressful and I had numerous migraines in a four-month period. Once I even got a demerol IM shot, which seemed like much ado about nothing -- I was hoping for great relief, but it didn't seem to do much. Now in my 50s, I only get about one a year, and it's pretty mild.
Just an anecdote, but very close person of mine was diagnosed with migraine when she was 12 yo old so.
Last year, being 40+ years old, suffering from weekly/daily pain events, she found out that diagnose was wrong (one doctor just asked that have you ever thought that this probably isn't migraine) and correct diagnose was Horton / cluster headache.
Eating migraine meds (lots of different ones) for several years were helping, but probably only due placebo effect.
Now, the medicine for headache attacks is simple: breathing pure oxygen for 15 minutes.
After last attack (1.5 year ago, stopped almost immediately breathing oxygen) there has not been any headaches.
Usually, it would not been nice to get diagnose for cluster headache, but on this case it was kind of life saver.
Still, just an anecdote.
I think everyone who suffers migraines has their own “relationship” with them.
Myself, I can tell when I am “pre-migraine” and know I have to sit down for a bit lest one develops. They most often come from eating junk food after exercise (I’m looking at you, Fritos). And warming my hands often helps speed the recovery, though I always end up with “tender brain” for 24-48h after.
I’m intrigued by another poster having success with Magnesium L-Threonate and will be placing an order today. Even if I don’t have a migraine, I have a headache 8 days out of 10.
> They most often come from eating junk food after exercise (I’m looking at you, Fritos).
Dehydration causes a good portion of mine, at least of the ones that I can point to a proximate cause of. I wonder if that's what you're experiencing, with the salty food after sweating?
I had a migraine for more than 15 years. After quitting caffeine completely as a self-experiment, it never came back. When the migraine came, I had it for at least 3 days without improving. So I had to take something with Triptan, like Dolortriptan.
The book "Heal Your Headache" by David Buchholz which, while a bit dated, has some good advice, recommends completely quitting caffeine. It talks a lot about diet, but it has the strongest words for caffeine. It considers it the worst of the food culprits.
It also has some controversial/outdated info, like:
- A migraine is a normal headache, but worse
- Don't take triptans -- get off them if you're on them
- Migraines are vascular.
Not saying it's wrong, but it's definitely controversial. I have no idea about the author's views on CGRP blockers, since the book considerably predates them.
I've never tried hard enough to quit caffeine. I'd like to give it a go. I typically feel better migraine-wise when I'm drinking 1 cup daily than when I'm drinking 2-3. But confounding variables etc etc etc.
Migraines being more than a headache has been the norm for at least 15-20 years. I remember hearing about how cluster headaches could be treated with psilocybin. I'm not able to access the rest of this article, but what's the new thing here? We already knew for years its not "just a headache"
i have been getting bad migraines for as long as i can remember. bad enough to vomit when i was a kid. nothing ever helped except when i took a healthy dose of lsd in highschool and they stopped completely for five years or so. i had been getting them around once every two months before that. then they came back in college and slowly got worse until i was having basically one long migraine for up to a week at a time. then i started taking nurtech. it helped a lot but only worked half the time — and when it did work i could still feel my body reeling from it but without pain. here is something curious: i noticed that nurtech would put me into an extremely good mood… almost to the point of being a different person. without any euphoria or intoxication. specifically, i noticed that i was much more open emotionally, much more personable and friendly. more open to letting people in. and thats when i really started to have a new perspective on just how much this disease had robbed from me. i cant even imagine how awesome it would have been to not be interrupted by these migraines, to not have to feel the throbbing pain, and maybe the whole trajectory of my life would have been different if i had been a little kinder and likable which, if im being honest, i was kind of known for not being. i dont really take nurtech anymore because i have found that hard physical work, sunlight, reducing total calories and cardiovascular exercise basically put them into remission. and im afraid of what nurtech might do to me long-term after seeing how profoundly it alters my personality. based on everything i know, i think its safe to say that migraines are a metabolic disorder. neurons become overexcited due to metabolic dysfunction which then causes a depolarization cascade that sweeps across other regions of the brain. thats why keto helps so much. i wonder if ozempic has a beneficial impact on migraine?
I get one about once a decade. My mother got them frequently.
Real migraines absolutely suck. A lot of folks describe regular headaches as “migraines,” but they are a pale imitation of the real thing.
In my case, they usually start in the morning, but don’t get really excruciating until early evening. I usually figure out it’s a migraine, about lunchtime. Around 9-10PM or so, I puke, then the headache starts leveling off, until I fall asleep. The next day, it’s as if nothing happened.
I did “short-circuit” one, the last time one started, using advice that I remembered from my mother. I sat in a recliner, in a dark room, with a towel wrapped around the top of my head and eyes (probably looked ridiculous). It’s important not to engage my eyes at all. After a couple of hours, the headache stopped.
On the contrary, I'd argue that migraines are probably much more common than diagnosed, rather than the other way around. Migraines, much like seizures, vary in both symptoms and severity.
Not my area of expertise, but anecdatally, everyone that I know, that has suffered from diagnosed migraines, has had really crippling symptoms. They seem to be fairly universally severe. I have had headaches all my life (including ones related to a brain tumor, back in the 1990s. The migraines don’t seem to be related to that tumor, which was treated with surgery). In my personal experience, the comparison is night and day. There’s a clear difference.
Basically, a migraine is a “day-ending” event. In my case, I’m fortunate that I can still get stuff done in the morning, but after lunch, the day’s pretty much a write-off.
I’m really grateful that they are so rare (I’ve had three full-term, and one “aborted” one, in the last 30 years). My mother used to get one or two a month, and her day ended fairly early. When I was a teenager, I got them more frequently.
I used to think everyone got migraines everyday, then I got diagnosed with sleep apnea. Hardly a thing for me anymore now that I use cpap, but I dealt with them constantly until my senior year in college.
But it reminds me how we only really know our own reality, and it's easy to assume our experience as "normal".
Anecdotal, but: I know someone with relevant migraine problems did a log of everything she was eating or doing, searching for possible triggers. After a few weeks there were a couple of suspects: glutamate, chocolate, and also some legumes. Removing these worked and reduced greatly the amount and extent of the problem. Currently legumes is ok sometimes, but consuming one of the first two is almost a guaranteed episode.
Haven't had a migraine with visual auras since giving up alcohol fwiw. My friend's dad specializes in headache treatment he said majority is dehydration which would add up for my case but interesting to see a comment below where someone gets them from too much water so I guess having the correct water balance is key.
Just throwing it in here in case it helps someone: if you have migraines, get an eye exam to check if you need glasses (you might not realize it!) and that your prescription is still sufficient.
long-time listener, first-time caller on HN. I've had migraines since I was a teen. Full blackout vision, then debilitating headache for 48 hours. About 18months ago I cut out food containing thickening agents (Xantham gum aka 415, et al). Have only had a migraine since then when I've had food containing these (which seems to be an increasing number of foods). I don't suggest it's a cure all, but worth trying for others out there. I've sat in job interviews, my wedding, kids' events dreading having one occur.
Lucky enough to get really quick relief from over the counter migraine meds (triptanes) at even tiny doses. Life changing when I realized I didn't have to do just obscene amounts of ibuprofen and coffee for pretty poor results, and even a half of these tiny pills worked.
Careful with them, they can trigger medically-induced migraines if overused. I did that mistake and it went to 3 days migraines every week (and 3x10mg + more every week)
Commenting to save this for post for later. I suffer from migraines regularly. I will try some of the suggestions here.
I had migraines which ceased when I switched from a steroid nasal spray to an allergy nasal spray. I guess the steroid spray was not good for my brain.
Edit: I even reintroduced the spray 2 years later (out of allergy spray) and had another migraine. It was surprising, as I only used it for a few days.
I get migraines with aura prior to storms
I’ll be damned if they’re not the result of some sort of swelling or inflammation of capillaries or the optic never or something. I can feel it in such clear detail.
I get migraines when I drink too much water! Not even kidding. Full blown visual aura followed by intense pain for a day.
I used to wonder if the headaches I have had were migraines. Then I had the kind where you go blind for a few minutes, followed by a migrain. Was the worst headache I've ever had, but I was so glad to have my vision back.
I had migraines with aura as a child from 12 to 16 years old. But then I got bruxism and the migraines went away. Traded one problem for another, I guess.
I don't love Huberman, but his episode on headaches/migraines was very informative. There was a lot of helpful tips for those suffering.
my wife would get a migraine every single day around 1pm. she scheduled her college around them. she did a bunch of genetic tests, and (this is not science to me, i dont know the process at all) she ended up trying a methylated vitamin b complex, 8333% usda dose, and they dried right up forever. i feel for anyone dealing with them. i got my first one 7 years ago and learned i am sensitive to soybeans. i can pop some raw soybeans into my mouth and have a visual aura and migraine within 30 minutes, it's fascinating.
My eyes were opened a few years ago when I was reading my mom’s brain mri report. She had cancer and was undergoing radiation treatment. The MRI noted lesions and said they could be due to cancer/radiation OR MIGRAINES!
Holy moly! Migraines can cause brain damage!
Anything backing this up except that one report? I haven't heard of headaches or migraines causing permanent damage.
Search Migrainous Infarction. I had one when I was 32 (53 now). It's very rare, but a migraine can cause a stroke (ie. permanent brain damage), because of impaired blood flow. It left me with a permanent scotoma ("black" hole in my fov, visible from both eyes and with both eyes open).
I was scanning the comments to see if anyone needed that information.
If the aura doesn't stop after an hour, better go to the hospital (aura means reduced blood flow). Also NEVER take triptans during an aura.
Can confirm, I had a brain MRI in my early 20s and had a number of white matter lesions that were supposedly caused by migraines. No other cognitive or neurological issues. But I'm due for another scan soon and hoping they haven't worsened :P
Might be a question of cause and effect. My neurologist theorized my migraines were triggered by microemboli leaking through a PFO (leak between left and right side of the heart: normally the lungs filter this stuff out)
PFO closed, migraines basically gone.
PFO can lead to stroke too for the same reason, and that's when it's usually closed, after a stroke. Not all migraines are caused by PFO. I went on blood thinners first for a year as a test.
Here's the long story version: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40895116
Migraine Is Associated With Magnetic Resonance Imaging White Matter Abnormalities https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/7...
"Research suggests that the answer is yes. Migraines can cause lesions, which are areas of damage to the brain." https://www.webmd.com/migraines-headaches/migraine-brain-les...
Some kind of local thermal overload?
I seem to get migraines from plant fats and stimulants like caffeine.also caffeine withdrawal.Been drinking chaga coffee a few days and feel so much better in the evening
My migraines have been with me for ten years now and they have slowly evolved their symptoms and triggers. Started off more as typical migraines that happened every other day, though i had head issues everyday. it later evolved to neck pain, jaw pain, temple numbness, throbbing headaches, inability to think or process things. lots of cooccurring head symptoms include feeling of blood pulsing.
visited countless medical people, most offered no real solutions or relief. only consistent insight, temperature baths for my head reduced at least tthe superficial symptoms but not the cognitive symptoms, the superficial symptoms seemed to be aggravated by sleep. the cognitive symptoms correlated to hard processing and thinking, straining the brain. but the detriment to my life made it hard balancing work and responsibilities. worse is the symptoms are debilitating at times and invisible, good luck getting sympathy or understanding from other people with that being the case. im homeless cause its better to not have repsonsibilities and control how much i strain my brain than deal with the headaches daily and worse.
this whole ordeal makes you realize how limited the medical profession is.
https://archive.md/Apbxw
Our understanding of migraines seems to be increasing exponentially
Stop all forms of coffee for 3 months you will be amazed at how few you get after that. Tea is fine, just no coffee. Life changer for me.
Some anecdata on prevention experiences:
* metaprolol (pulse-slowing beta-blocker): fewer attacks per month, "dampened" attacks, bad side effects (fatigue, energy loss, dark moods)
* magnesium supplements: no noticable effect (they say it might have an effect if you happen to get too little through your food)
* vitamin B: no noticable effect
* simvastatin (cholesterol lowering medicine): some fewer attacks per month, but attacks when they come seem full strength
* candesartan (also a blood pressure medicine): much fewer attacks per month, "dampened" attacks, very few side effects, current "winner"
(CGRP's are expensive, haven't tried.)
For stopping attacks, triptanes work well.
I get migraines about 6 - 8 times a year, complete with visual aura and very occasionally speech aphasia. I tracked them in a spreadsheet for years so have a rough idea of triggers but it's proven fairly bad at predicting.
I've tried many drugs to combat them, but there is one thing that helps me short-circuit it 99% of the time is a high amount of caffeine. It's not perfect -- I liken it to side-stepping a train; you get missed by the train itself but still get thrown off by the wind and noise, still fall hard on the ground, still get bruised but not hurt as badly -- but it works well enough, so as soon as I get the visual aura, I slam back a strong coffee and know that it'll work. Why? No idea, perhaps the pressure in the brain's blood vessels are affected?
What I don't see as often discussed is the subtle changes in consciousness that accompany migraines.
For me, in the pre phase (12 hours or less before the true onset), the first sign that I'm heading towards one is a sudden immediate bias towards pessimism with a kind of resignedness too (which is quite unlike my normal states of mind). That's often my first clue. It's like the storm clouds are gathering on the horizon and all light and colour is drained from my life.
Then, the visual aura hits. Now I know what's happening with certainty and I hit my caffeine prophylactic. The caffeine stimulation combined with the first inklings of pain and knowledge that you're about to go "into the shit" gives you quite a fight/flight feeling. You're at a bit of a loss as to what to do, since you're amped up but there's nothing to do but wait it out.
Then once the aura fades, you feel quite strange. I'll typically go lie down at this stage. If the caffeine worked (which is like 99% likely for me), I feel in a kind of haze but I'm not in deep pain - just uncomfortable and mentally quite scattered, though I'm no longer pessimistic about the future. In fact, it's like time collapses, and I'm forced to be in the moment. It makes me feel sick to try to think about the past or future - it all feels like a huge burden to try to internalize those states of time. I just try to focus on my body and how I'm feeling. It's almost like a meditative state. I can't sleep due to the caffeine but I try to rest and keep my mind clear.
At some point I'll realize that I'm mostly through it, and can get up and move around and generally kind of resume my day. But it feels like a hangover of sorts. Everything is hazy. Thinking is difficult. Very sensitive to light and noise.
Then, surprisingly, the next day I'll feel mentally GREAT like my mind was cleaned.
Which brings me to the most interesting part of all this for me - the migraine has a lot of similarities to a psychedelic trip. There's a come-up that's distressing, a plateau where one is forced to be in-the-moment, a depletion afterwards, and the next day onwards a feeling that things are cleaner and better ordered than before, like your mind and spirit has been defragged.
Perhaps both the migraine and the psychedelics are stressors or some kind of release valve on your brain.
One wonders if there's increased brain plasticity post-migraine like with psychedelics.
I can get migraines, but they’re “silent migraines” which means there’s little or no pain aspect. Thankfully it was pretty straightforward to root out the trigger - caffeine. I still love coffee, but I’m decaf only now. I drink Equator Coffee’s natural process decafs.
I get a migraine with aura about once every 6 months. It can last between a few minutes to several hours. When this happens, part of my field of vision disappears randomly and it becomes difficult to focus on anything or read. Then after the aura, I get a bad headache.
Sometimes, if I start to feel sensitive to light (a sign that I'm about to have a migraine aura), I take a paracetamol and it prevents it completely. The trick for me is to catch it early and notice the signs. My migraines seem to correlate with my stress levels, too much thinking and/or insufficient sleep.