Frustrating to see that migraines are still underfunded and under-researched. If you have ever experienced a migraine, you likely share my frustration. It is about as indescribable an affliction as anything can be. The overwhelming and crippling pain is something hard to convey to someone who hasn’t experienced it first hand. It also seems that everyone experiences them slightly differently.
I typically get an aura that starts at about the 4 o’clock direction just outside the center of my right eye. The aura eventually expands and sometimes will end up obscuring 85-90 percent of my field of vision. It will also sometimes end up obscuring vision in both eyes.
In addition to the aura, I typically start feeling a bit of an upset stomach. Not nausea but rather a gas-like -- almost butterfly-in-stomach type feeling most closely associated with anxiety. Hard to say if it’s related to the migraines in that it’s a precursor or adjacent issue or it’s due to the anxiety of an anticipated migraine.
The aura lasts for 10-20 minutes usually then quickly dissipates. Over the next half hour to hour, the pain will gradually start to creep in behind my right eye. The pain steadily increases over the next several hours eventually becoming incapacitating. I try to take 2 fioricet (the only medication outside of opiates that I’ve found to be effective) as soon as I confirm the aura is real and not just a bit of blurry vision (this is in itself quite an issue as it can be hard to tell sometimes and I wonder if I’ve triggered migraines by working myself into a tizzy out of fear of dealing with the pain). Sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s always tricky with meds to tell if they are working because you don’t dare skip them to see lest you end up suffering for hours on end.
The pain feels like it starts at a point behind my right eye and travels straight back into my brain in a sort of football shape. I try to find a quiet dark room and use an ice pack on my forehead and eyes. I usually have the tv or something on to try and distract, otherwise I just sit there thinking about how much pain I’m in. The hope is the fioricet etc helps with sleep which is really the best way to get through.
I was accepted into our states medical marijuana program for migraines and it has definitely seemed to reduce frequency. Unfortunately, though, it doesn’t help me at all once a migraine hits.
The migraine will typically last 8-12 hours or hopefully will be gone by the time I wake up if I’m able to fall asleep. However, for the following 1.5-2 days I’m extremely groggy and feel almost hungover without the usual hangover sickness. If I cough or strain in any way, I will feel pain in the football shape where the migraine pain was. Eventually this will fade over several days.
Anyway, here’s to hoping we can eventually figure this one out. I wouldn’t wish migraines on anyone.
They work for some people. Maybe 30%? But they all have significant side effects. One neurologist I went to said he could prescribe me one of two. “One will make you fat and the other will make you stupid” was what he told me. I was in grad school so I told him I could deal with weight but I needed my brain. He told me I would be surprised how many people made the opposite choice.
In the end the one I tried didn’t work for me anyway...
A few of the putative anti-migraine drugs are antihistamines. (Esp. H3 and H4.) But there's still no evidence they actually work.
Relating anything to diet is somewhat silly at this point as there's enough cases with wildly varying diets. It's a great way to sell a quack treatment though.
Yes. I have yet to find a diet that quells the attacks unfortunately. I had hope it might be sodium related, but cutting it out of my diet (mostly) had no noticeable effect.
I’m a chronic migraine sufferer. I’ve had them at least since I was five.
I strongly suspect that “migraine” is not a single disease. In fact I suspect that my migraines aren’t all the same thing. The headaches I get now are far different than the ones I got when I was five. Then, I’d get a dual-sided headache followed within an hour by the extreme nausea. Once I threw up I could sleep; the pain would be gone the next day. I was also light sensitive.
When I was a teenager I got a right-sided migraine without nausea or aura every Sunday afternoon at 2:00. You could set your watch by it. Again, I could sleep them off. By that time OTC painkillers that actually worked were a thing, and Motrin also knocked them out.
As an adult, I have no pattern, no nausea, and no aura. And OTC painkillers no longer work, but a rizatriptan plus two Excedrin works like a champ. But now? They’re triggered by poor posture. They start in my neck and end up over one eye but not always the same one. If I try to sleep them off they’re much worse on day two.
My son gets migraines about every third day, and neither the OTC nor the prescription painkillers work very well.
We don’t know what causes migraines. Some but not all can be stopped via interrupting the seratonin cycle. I think a big part of the treatment problem is that the diagnosis is clinical.
Migraine can suck a lot. I'm glad I only get them once in a bluemoon. The pattern is interesting, though. Did you have a special sunday habit? Like having the same or similar meals on sundays, so that it could have been triggered by an ingredient? Going to church, where maybe incense was burned? Anything?
We went to church. It was low church though so no incense. For a while I thought I might be allergic to the church carpet. But even on the rare Sunday where we didn’t go to church I still got my migraine.
I've had them since I was very young too. When I was a child they were accompanied by really high fevers, up to 105F and would last for two to three days, where I'd just mostly sleep in misery (they'd make me incredibly tired and sleepy). The doctors would check for meningitis with spinal taps, they'd check for encephalopathy, tumors, anything they could think of, nothing ever came back positive. I was put on inderal for a while, but that didn't really do anything. I'd have one every year or so, then since my teens I've only had one every few years. The past few years though I'm back to the yearly migraine, but no fever and they only last a day.
I'm not entirely convinced they're not just a side effect of our enhanced cognition, something like a problematic feedback loop, maybe even something related to epilepsy. The bigger the brain, the more than can go wrong.
Yep, that was an idea, but aside from the temp, nothing abnormal was detected. It terrified the docs the first couple of times it happened, they were afraid I'd die. After I didn't, they were less scared, but still concerned. No answers ever came. The fevers came with the migraines for about 6-7 years. Only once did it get to that 105 range, probably the third time, never again, and each time it was less. The theory was that my body didn't know what was happening and the immune response of a fever was triggered by mistake.
Up until I was twelve I would get the exact same thing, headache that slowly got worse, building up to nausea, eventually throwing up and feeling better. Doctors had no clue what was up, never heard of anyone having the same thing. Thankfully gone now, but replaced with a few immune system issues that I'm suspicious are caused by the same underlying problem
Interesting the article doesn't talk about nicotine. Nicotine was my savior from one sided-headaches that accentuated by continued computer and screen abuse.
I have found nicotine to be a major relief and hardly addictive (though this is probably very person-specific, so tread carefully). I could go on for a month without smoking but if I'm working with a computer, I could not pull off more than a couple hours without my vape device close.
Sometimes I wonder if smokers are actually addicted or suffer from other unrelated-pain that makes them reliant on nicotine for relief.
>I could go on for a month without smoking but if I'm working with a computer, I could not pull off more than a couple hours without my vape device close
Be careful, I was in your shoes until I started vaping and the convenience can make you a constant user, until one day vaping is such a part of your daily habits that you're an addict.
Also if you're vaping custom juices and not something commercial like Juul, you're probably consuming a different form of nicotine which isn't as effective or addictive - though at some point I expect custom juices to switch to nicotine salts as well, if they haven't already. Point is the nicotine in salt form is much stronger - you'll notice that Juul hits more like a cigarette, even with far less vapor.
Point is don't make the mistake I made and forget that you're playing with fire. Granted there's nothing yet to suggest that vaping clean nicotine/of/vg is harmful...
> one day vaping is such a part of your daily habits that you're an addict.
You mean the very act of vaping and not the nicotine itself. I can very much relate to that.
Here are a few tricks I found that can reduce it:
- Put the kit in the car. Helps more if the car is in under-ground or far and it's cold outside.
- Don't always put your kit on the charger. Intentionally, forget charging it and don't have two batteries.
- Buy a 30ml bottle at a time. It helps more if the dealer you are buying from is far. You'll ration your vaping with that because then you'll have to go all the way to buy the next bottle.
And yeah I'm not aware yet of nicotine salt and I use a very low concentration in my liquid. I don't think I'm going to switch the current setup is just fine.
Addiction to nicotine... yeah it's real, and cigarettes are more addictive. It's an urge to have a smoke, coupled with sometimes severe withdrawal symptoms (I can't focus for shit, am extremely angry, for days, then tired for weeks when I try quitting). I'm vaping now and it's easier on my body it seems, no more random coughing or brain fog.
I am now almost certain that acetaldehyde is my migraine trigger. The sources for me included chocolate, alcohol, tomatoes, certain fish and preserved meats, all of which are common sources of acetaldehyde.
I can't always avoid these things, but I can usually avoid combining them, and migraines are now less frequent and a lot milder - unpleasant rather than debilitating.
I have also found that dehydration is a major factor. If I skip breakfast or lunch then I make sure I drink, even if just tea or a large glass of water.
So many migraines are triggered by commonly used chemicals that are difficult to remove from our environment. Even if they're sporadically present, it can take hours for them to trigger a migraine, so the association is extremely difficult to draw. Fragrance chemicals are very common triggers, but again, they're very difficult to remove from our lives given their ubiquity and increasing popularity to the point where people can't fathom living without them. One of the worst offenders and most difficult to remove are fragranced dryer sheets. People who use them are virutally never relieved of being exposed from them given that they're in clothes, towels, and bedding, and the chemicals offgas months or years. It's exceedingly difficult to find personal care products that are free of these unnecessary chemicals. And "natural" products like essential oils are common triggers and probably no better.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 55.1 ms ] threadFrustrating to see that migraines are still underfunded and under-researched. If you have ever experienced a migraine, you likely share my frustration. It is about as indescribable an affliction as anything can be. The overwhelming and crippling pain is something hard to convey to someone who hasn’t experienced it first hand. It also seems that everyone experiences them slightly differently.
I typically get an aura that starts at about the 4 o’clock direction just outside the center of my right eye. The aura eventually expands and sometimes will end up obscuring 85-90 percent of my field of vision. It will also sometimes end up obscuring vision in both eyes.
In addition to the aura, I typically start feeling a bit of an upset stomach. Not nausea but rather a gas-like -- almost butterfly-in-stomach type feeling most closely associated with anxiety. Hard to say if it’s related to the migraines in that it’s a precursor or adjacent issue or it’s due to the anxiety of an anticipated migraine.
The aura lasts for 10-20 minutes usually then quickly dissipates. Over the next half hour to hour, the pain will gradually start to creep in behind my right eye. The pain steadily increases over the next several hours eventually becoming incapacitating. I try to take 2 fioricet (the only medication outside of opiates that I’ve found to be effective) as soon as I confirm the aura is real and not just a bit of blurry vision (this is in itself quite an issue as it can be hard to tell sometimes and I wonder if I’ve triggered migraines by working myself into a tizzy out of fear of dealing with the pain). Sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s always tricky with meds to tell if they are working because you don’t dare skip them to see lest you end up suffering for hours on end.
The pain feels like it starts at a point behind my right eye and travels straight back into my brain in a sort of football shape. I try to find a quiet dark room and use an ice pack on my forehead and eyes. I usually have the tv or something on to try and distract, otherwise I just sit there thinking about how much pain I’m in. The hope is the fioricet etc helps with sleep which is really the best way to get through.
I was accepted into our states medical marijuana program for migraines and it has definitely seemed to reduce frequency. Unfortunately, though, it doesn’t help me at all once a migraine hits.
The migraine will typically last 8-12 hours or hopefully will be gone by the time I wake up if I’m able to fall asleep. However, for the following 1.5-2 days I’m extremely groggy and feel almost hungover without the usual hangover sickness. If I cough or strain in any way, I will feel pain in the football shape where the migraine pain was. Eventually this will fade over several days.
Anyway, here’s to hoping we can eventually figure this one out. I wouldn’t wish migraines on anyone.
In the end the one I tried didn’t work for me anyway...
Relating anything to diet is somewhat silly at this point as there's enough cases with wildly varying diets. It's a great way to sell a quack treatment though.
... do you mean that there are some people who don't ?
>Migraine affects one in seven of the world’s population – approximately a billion people
I strongly suspect that “migraine” is not a single disease. In fact I suspect that my migraines aren’t all the same thing. The headaches I get now are far different than the ones I got when I was five. Then, I’d get a dual-sided headache followed within an hour by the extreme nausea. Once I threw up I could sleep; the pain would be gone the next day. I was also light sensitive.
When I was a teenager I got a right-sided migraine without nausea or aura every Sunday afternoon at 2:00. You could set your watch by it. Again, I could sleep them off. By that time OTC painkillers that actually worked were a thing, and Motrin also knocked them out.
As an adult, I have no pattern, no nausea, and no aura. And OTC painkillers no longer work, but a rizatriptan plus two Excedrin works like a champ. But now? They’re triggered by poor posture. They start in my neck and end up over one eye but not always the same one. If I try to sleep them off they’re much worse on day two.
My son gets migraines about every third day, and neither the OTC nor the prescription painkillers work very well.
We don’t know what causes migraines. Some but not all can be stopped via interrupting the seratonin cycle. I think a big part of the treatment problem is that the diagnosis is clinical.
Migraine can suck a lot. I'm glad I only get them once in a bluemoon. The pattern is interesting, though. Did you have a special sunday habit? Like having the same or similar meals on sundays, so that it could have been triggered by an ingredient? Going to church, where maybe incense was burned? Anything?
I'm not entirely convinced they're not just a side effect of our enhanced cognition, something like a problematic feedback loop, maybe even something related to epilepsy. The bigger the brain, the more than can go wrong.
But who knows? Maybe unusual electrical activity in the brain can cause increased core temp?
I have found nicotine to be a major relief and hardly addictive (though this is probably very person-specific, so tread carefully). I could go on for a month without smoking but if I'm working with a computer, I could not pull off more than a couple hours without my vape device close.
Sometimes I wonder if smokers are actually addicted or suffer from other unrelated-pain that makes them reliant on nicotine for relief.
Be careful, I was in your shoes until I started vaping and the convenience can make you a constant user, until one day vaping is such a part of your daily habits that you're an addict.
Also if you're vaping custom juices and not something commercial like Juul, you're probably consuming a different form of nicotine which isn't as effective or addictive - though at some point I expect custom juices to switch to nicotine salts as well, if they haven't already. Point is the nicotine in salt form is much stronger - you'll notice that Juul hits more like a cigarette, even with far less vapor.
Point is don't make the mistake I made and forget that you're playing with fire. Granted there's nothing yet to suggest that vaping clean nicotine/of/vg is harmful...
You mean the very act of vaping and not the nicotine itself. I can very much relate to that.
Here are a few tricks I found that can reduce it:
- Put the kit in the car. Helps more if the car is in under-ground or far and it's cold outside.
- Don't always put your kit on the charger. Intentionally, forget charging it and don't have two batteries.
- Buy a 30ml bottle at a time. It helps more if the dealer you are buying from is far. You'll ration your vaping with that because then you'll have to go all the way to buy the next bottle.
And yeah I'm not aware yet of nicotine salt and I use a very low concentration in my liquid. I don't think I'm going to switch the current setup is just fine.
I think the effects differ from person to person though on average it might be addictive. For example, caffeine at night makes me sleepy.
I can't always avoid these things, but I can usually avoid combining them, and migraines are now less frequent and a lot milder - unpleasant rather than debilitating.
I have also found that dehydration is a major factor. If I skip breakfast or lunch then I make sure I drink, even if just tea or a large glass of water.