things you could try altering: Sleep Sleep position/environment Light (exposure of your eyes to light) Food vitamins exercise Posture allergies (non-food, may include fibres, washing powder, local plants , anything that touches your skin i.e. Jewellery, skin-cream, toothpaste, dust, fungi, mould and bacteria)
Other misc: metal toxicity, check for lead in your environment/blood (kits can be purchased online) radiation inner-ear problems (causing potential dizzyness and leading to migranes)
Other other: Someone I knew had a 6 week long reccuring migrane, a doctor recommended taking the maximum safe doses of 3 different panadol (paracetamol), neurophen, aspirin, drugs at once (the ones that work with different mechanisms, I think it was those 3). She woke up in the morning and has been fine since (several years ago).
other other other: any epilepsy run in the family? some people grow out of them as they grow through their teenage years. Have you finished your growing?
I try to limit my drug intake to what is safe. But I sometimes use as much as I possibly can in one go. Usually, that is when I either have a few days off so I can just get my migraine down to a headache with a lot of drugs (lasts for a day, max) or when it is very bad. When it is very bad, it just reduces it to my normal levels. And I don't think anyone in my family has epilepsy, though quite a few have had migraines. I have stopped growing.
Thanks for the advice, I hadn't heard about the lead kits, or the inner ear problems before. I'll try and get on that.
So, I read a post a little while ago saying that asking the community for advice on personal problems was okay, and no one seemed to disagree strongly with this. Therefore, I'll just ask for some advice, and hope that I'm not accidentally going past some line. If I do, I apologise
I have had migraines for quite a while now. They started when I was a child, but were infrequent in those days. They got progressively worse as time went on, and things started to get quite bad when I was about 12. A few years down the line, I would have headaches for months at a time, with migraines popping up for a few days a month. It got worse from there. Now, I have had migraine-like symptoms for 10 months now. I say migraine-like because part of the definition of a migraine is that it lasts from about 3 hours to a few days. According to a neurologist I recently went to, I have transformative migraines, or wording similar to that. So I have all the symptoms of migraines, except they last for inordinate amounts of time. I've had an MRI, and it showed nothing wrong with my brain. According to the World Health Organisation, this is more disabling than blindness, and as bad as acute psychosis: http://www.migrainetrust.org/chronic-migraine You can see why its rather important to me that I get rid of/deal with this.
Now, I've tried quite a lot of things over the years, especially in the last two or so. NSAIDs do very little, and thing like migraleve (paracetamol with codeine) are a little better. Sumatriptan provides some relief, but it doesn't get rid of the migraine. At best it will knock me down to a weak migraine. I've tried taking propanalol (160mg) for half a year, and it does little to help. I was prescribd Amitiptyline (10mg) a week ago, but it hasn't had much effect. I was told to increase by 10mg it every two weeks until I hit 30mg. I've also tried cutting things out like chocolates, and dairy for a month. It didn't have any effect. I also don't have any caffeine. So this eliminates some common causes of migraines. My migraines sometimes respond to heat/cold applied to my head, but this is only some of the time, due to my migraines shifting in nature. Further, it only takes the edge of them. I've also tried taking magnesium supplements, but they had a negative effect on me i.e. strange dreams and insomnia. That just made my problems worse. Also, I've ruled out medication overuse.
So, does anyone have any recommendations? There should be a few people who have had experience with this level of migraines, and I expect they might be able to provide some advice. I'm not too optimistic, but I really need something that works.