Upvoted to encourage more people to ask LW for help in this way, which I think is good trend. But I would suggest a title that describes more specifically what the post is about (i.e. "LW, help me with my migraines" or something).
I have no advice on the migraines themselves but I wish you luck.
If you want conventional advice, I guess the best thing is just to follow what your doctor says.
If you want experimental advice, I went to a talk on rational drug policy, at which it was mentioned that 5-HT2A agonists, aka psychedelic drugs, stop migraines. The theoretical neuroscience behind it checks out too (modulating vasoconstriction).
See this:
http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060911/full/news060911-05.html https://www.erowid.org/plants/mushrooms/mushrooms_article8.pdf
Where cluster headaches are discussed, but cluster headaches and migranes are very sim...
A few years ago I suffered from an extremely severe case of repetitive strain injury/tendinitis. (As far as I can tell, attempts by medical professionals to come up with careful definitions for those terms have mostly failed, so I use them interchangeably.) My case was more severe than almost any I have ever heard about—I was stuck controlling my computer using a voice recognition system for over a year and spent all of my time being unemployed, depressed, and living with my parents. What finally solved my problem was information about trigger points fo...
If you searching general things to try, curetogether is good website. It provides a list of 237 Migraine interventions and self reported effects of those interventions.
The strongest recommendation seems to be for "Dark Room and No Noise" and "Sleep".
I would seek a 100% dark room when you sleep. Seek to get a regular schedule with 8 hours of sleep where you go to bed every day at the same time.
Floating tanks are worth trying.
I would use good noise cancellation headphones plus guided relaxation/hypnosis recordings to fight cases of h...
I suffered from severe migraines for most of my life, but they were much more frequent when I was younger -- about two or three times a week. During high school they decreased in frequency a lot, to maybe once a month or once every two months, and now that I am in my late '20s, I only get migraines once or twice a year. Unfortunately I can't give you much rationalist advice; although I discussed migraines with my doctor and we worked together to find a solution, to my understanding it's still not a scientifically well-understood problem. So all I can tell ...
Here's what's helped for me. I had strong headaches that would persist for weeks, with some auras, which my doctor called migraines. (They don't seem to be as bad as what people usually mean by the word.) A flaxseed oil supplement keeps them away. When I don't take enough, they come back; it needs to be at least 15g/day or so (many times more than the 2-3 gelcaps/day that supplement bottles direct you to take). I've taken fish oil occasionally instead.
I found this by (non-blinded) experimenting with different allegedly anti-inflammatory supplements. I'm not a doctor, etc.
I spent about a month a couple years ago having migraines, which I had never had before and inexplicably stopped having afterwards. I was prescribed a generic version of Fiorecet; you don't mention it or its unusual ingredient (butalbital; it also contains caffeine and acetaminophen). This worked almost completely if I managed to take the pill during my prodomal symptoms (weird visual aura, in my case; I don't know if you get this warning). However, even unmedicated my headaches did not last as long as it sounds like yours do. Apparently Fiorecet isn't...
It seems to me that you've exhausted the traditional approaches to diagnosing and treating your issue, and that you're unlikely to stumble upon a solution yourself. My guess is that your best bet is to figure out who the real specialists are and see one.
I also suspect that there are a lot of tests that could be done that your doctors haven't ordered due to costs, and that would be useful. Depending on your financial situation and how much this means to you, perhaps you could make it clear to them that you would like more extensive testing and are willing t...
@Alicorn, have you managed to fix this problem yet?
I read that a while back and I've been thinking about it for a while. After reading the discussion post in this thread, I thought I'd post this suggestion since the community doesn't appear to have a consensus approach to the problem.
Alicorn, have you considered adding more dimensions than diet to your self-tracking? And @Algon, have you considered self-tracking. If I had migraines constantly, it would be well worth my time to figure out the problem. I've been brainstorming dimensions to assess over the la...
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 do...
Are you female? Then you could try going off the pill and use another form of contraception, or switch to another pill. Migraines can be hormone-related; I used to get them at ovulation and at the onset of menstruation, back when I still had those.
Have you checked for allergies and food sensitivities? I used to know someone who would get migraines a few days after eating seafood.
Does alcohol have any effect? My girlfriend suffers from TMJ which causes her headaches and alcohol helps her jaw muscles relax.
A few years ago I suffered from an extremely severe case of repetitive strain injury/tendinitis. (As far as I can tell, attempts by medical professionals to come up with careful definitions for those terms have mostly failed, so I use them interchangeably.) My case was more severe than almost any I have ever heard about—I was stuck controlling my computer using a voice recognition system for over a year and spent all of my time being unemployed, depressed, and living with my parents. What finally solved my problem was information about trigger points found in this book and this ebook. I actually purchased the first book relatively early on in my condition, because I wanted to try everything, but I was convinced it was pseudoscience and put it down after only a couple minutes of reading. It was only the skeptical tone and citations in the second ebook that convinced me trigger points were a thing. Since my experience, I’ve talked to other people with chronic RSI, mostly within the Less Wrong community, and my current guess is that trigger points are responsible for most chronic RSIs, as well as a wide variety of chronic pain problems that science currently isn’t very good at treating (the same trigger point therapy that was useful for my tendinitis was also very useful for my chronic knee pain, stomach pain, and back pain).
I mention this because the first book I linked to cites trigger points as a possible cause of migraines. I recommend searching for migraine info using the index. There’s also this web page by the author of the second ebook.
If trigger points are a significant factor in your migraines, I expect that you will find the right massage therapy or acupuncture treatments helpful, and in the best case they will clear your condition up entirely with clever and diligent application, although they will aggravate your condition a bit initially (for maybe a couple days after treatment; this is discussed more in the resources I pointed you to). (This great textbook explains how acupuncture works.)
(Unfortunately my latest chronic pain condition is eyestrain, which is not capitulating as easy as the previous ones; the muscles in my eyes are not accessible for massage the way most of the muscles in my body are. I’ve been doing self-acupuncture (after reading lots of safety information) to try to relax the smooth muscle tissue innervated by both my eyes and areas accessible to a needle (it’d be really spiffy if I could talk to someone who has expertise in neuroanatomy) and it seems helpful but it hasn’t been a slam dunk. Wrote this post mostly using a screen reader so I wouldn’t have to look at my screen very much.)
That sounds quite promising. I've heard a bit about acupuncture, and its on my countries national health service, so I'll give it a go.
Apparently some research has been done on this, which has shed some light on the subject, but its not yet been able to explain it all. Apparently its pretty difficult to perform a quality experiment to check hypothesis about acupuncture.
Thanks for the advice. No one else recommended it, and I had put acupuncture fairly low on my to try list. If you hadn't recommended it, I probably wouldn't have thought of it for a while.
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.