'I'm for truth, no matter who tells it.' – Malcolm X

Despite the realisation a few weeks ago that I would never find a cure for chronic migraines and needed to establish a good management plan, I find myself wondering more and more about what's causing mine. I don't know if this is more magical thinking: If I just find the first cause and fix that, then everything will be better. Since I was diagnosed with chronic migraines almost a decade ago, it's bothered me how unconcerned the medical profession is about finding the cause. As long as they're treating the symptoms (usually with medication), then that's good enough. I realised that even my current alternative therapists, chiropractor and acupuncture, are mostly about treating the symptoms and getting me through the migraine incident.

I feel there must be some underlying cause more compelling (and treatable) than inherited pre-disposition. Why do I have chronic migraines and my mother, grandmother and aunt only have one or two a year? Why does my body feel a need to react to stress with a migraine? Why when I don't sleep well or have a build-up of muscle tension do I get a migraine, but my husband just gets a little grouchy?

I've got some ideas of how I might be able to answer these questions for myself or waste money trying. 1) A friend suggested kinesiology by which she means applied kinesiology. Wikipedia, the source of all truth, says it's unproven and 'no more useful than random guessing.'
2) A few years ago a fairly sensible colleague mentioned hypnotherapy as being effective for an ailment she had. Wikipedia is more positive about hypnotherapy and even cites a 1995 study that said, 'The evidence supporting the effectiveness of hypnosis in alleviating chronic pain associated with cancer seems strong. In addition, the panel was presented with other data suggesting the effectiveness of hypnosis in other chronic pain conditions, which include… tension headaches.'
3) I could do my own literature review to read about migraine brains and what makes them different.
4) I  may try an elimination diet again to see if there are any new foods I need to avoid or ones I have been that I can now eat again.

This is probably another attempt to control and understand the uncontrollable and little-known.

‘Migraine, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me.’ – The War of the Worlds by HG Wells

I thought I should share my migraine credentials. I started getting migraines when I was 17 (about half my lifetime ago). I would wake up every Friday in the middle of the night. After a trip to the bathroom to be sick, I would go back to bed and usually be ok by the next day. For weeks it happened like clockwork. Then in university the migraines would flair up during exam times, sometimes lasting for a week. I got through it, became a teacher and continued getting them during stressful times like camp and report-writing weeks at the end of each term. Throughout this period, I relied on painkillers and rest, although somehow I rarely took sick days.

Then during one summer break in my twenties things changed. I don’t know what triggered it, and my doctors didn’t seem interested in helping me find out. For weeks I got migraines every two to three days. I would be recovering from one when the next one would hit. I feel immense gratitude that I wasn’t working at the time because I would not have been able to continue. I saw GPs and a neurologist, who gave me stronger painkillers and the first of my daily, chronic migraine medications. Since I didn’t like the idea of being on drugs that could be doing who-knew-what to my brain, I began exploring alternative treatments.

Today I have gone on and off many daily, preventative medications with varying results and side-effects. I’ve visited many alternative, non-Western, traditional (whatever you want to call them) practitioners also with varying results and side-effects. I think I’ve been given advice from every medical and non-medical person I’ve met, whether I asked for it or not. This blog will be my chance to document some of that and (hopefully) explore some new or untried options so that I don’t need to rely on the current brain-chemistry altering medications forever.