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.