Archive for July, 2016
expose/pose
Psychological explanations of migraine remain an extraordinarily popular trope in self-help books for migraine care. Take, for example, the most popular self-help book on this topic, Heal Your Headache: The 1.2.3 Program, by David Buchholz, a neurologist from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Buchholz recommends a strict treatment protocol for migraine prevention, which includes the […]
Three Dozen Migraine Susceptibility Loci Uncovered in Large Meta-Analysis
Three Dozen Migraine Susceptibility Loci Uncovered in Large Meta-Analysis Nice writeup of this meta analysis in Nature. If you don’t want to do the free registration to read the genomeweb piece, they 38 loci (loci = spot in the genome) associated with migraine, including 28 that had never been found before. A couple interesting things […]
Migraine Art #082 by Migraine Art Via Flickr: From new book Migraine Art by Klaus Podoll and Derek Robinson
[I]n 1973, Seymour Diamond and Donald Dalessio, then codirectors of the famous Diamond Headache Clinic in Chicago, wrote that the inability of people with migraine to adapt represents the repressed hostility of the migraine patient. Joanna Kempner in Not Tonight I am actually pretty angry about having a painful and debilitating disease that most people […]
June migraine log
A graph of my migraines over the last few years. July 2016 data thru day 12. Severity continues to decline, but frequency doesn’t seem to be budging much. The number of days with migraine looked like it was starting to go down before June – which was when I started my gradual ramp-up of work. […]
Botox for migraines – time for improvement
When I first got Botox it didn’t do a goddamn thing – except paralyze my forehead. But after I’d gotten multiple rounds of injections over the course of 6-9 months, I saw real improvement in the intensity of my attacks. Now, there’s evidence showing that you could still expect big improvements from Botox even after […]
The internal milieu of the un-curable patient
The embrace of biochemical approaches meant the corresponding rejection of psychogenic theories. … That the efficacy of a medication should erode a psychosomatic theory is not surprising. This is a fairly common phenomenon. Several disorders understood to be psychosomatic (depression or stomach ulcers, for example) were reframed as somatic with the discovery of effective medication. […]