Migraine Prevention Article

Migraine treatments

After umpteen million migraine treatments, this kid despaired to the point where when she had a migraine, she would go into the coolest, darkest place in the house—the bathroom—and lie on the floor with her head against the cold stone of the tub and beg, “Just kill me. Please, just kill me.” This kid had had too early on the subjection to the worst of physical ailments: the kind of pain you cannot meditate away with your thoughts or do mind-control exercises or experiments with to stop your head from thinking about pain…as the pain is IN the tool you use to think away or re-think.

Then again, one of the advanced migraine treatments of the sixties and seventies (especially the latter) was to use a form of biofeedback, psychically reducing or eliminating the pain by focusing on changing the alpha/beta wave patterns by warming the hands and rubbing the feet, etc.. The blood leaves the extremities during [most] migraines. If you suffer these abominations, you will notice at onset your hands and feet are cold. So warming by rubbing does a couple of things: it returns blood flow, and it changes your brain wave patterns/activity so the focus is not so all-consuming.

These groovier versions of migraine treatments were suggested after the kid had been suggested to chemical migraine treatments (Equigesic, sub-lingual pills, Caffergot, Darvoset, and more); to allergy identification migraine treatments (trying to find the offending food or smell source and eliminating it); and to those migraine education sessions in the family doctor’s office that helped only to the degree that they justified and consoled with pamphlets on the history of migraines and famous migraine sufferers or the medical explanation that a normal blood flow runs through the fingers of veins, axons, dendrites at a regulated pace, but abnormally pools and bunches in one area thereby creating the traffic jam throbbing as blood attempts to gush into an area only capable of taking half that amount.

The kid tried migraine treatments as they were developed and introduced. She read up on migraine treatments. She continued to suffer the bastards. The years of Qualuudes and other ill-gotten street versions of migraine treatments aside, she found that only two methods combined work for her: doctor prescribed Imitrex (which she took at onset, foregoing, after the first trial, the preliminary pills that made her puke more) and the highly controversial (addictive) Vicodin.

The frustrating reality is that migraines are not fully understood and migraine treatments are just that…treatments that get you high enough to forget but that do not cure or eliminate.