Complaints & connections · borters.ch
Not an ordinary headache but an over-sensitive nervous system that answers stimuli with attacks — treatable once you know your own triggers.
Also known as: migraine
Open in the tool — with search and all the links →This compilation is for information and replaces neither medical diagnosis nor treatment. If you have symptoms, see a doctor.
Migraine is not a strong headache but a disease in its own right: a nervous system that filters stimuli less well and answers in waves with an attack. Typically a one-sided, throbbing pain that worsens with movement, together with nausea and sensitivity to light, noise and smells. Untreated, an attack lasts four to seventy-two hours. About one person in three knows an aura: shimmering, zigzag lines or a gap in the visual field, more rarely tingling or speech trouble, spreading over minutes and gone within an hour. Often the attack begins a day earlier with yawning, food cravings, a stiff neck or mood swings — knowing these forerunners allows earlier action. Triggers are very personal; the best established are irregular sleep, skipped meals, alcohol, the fall in oestrogen before a period, and the let-down after stress. A headache diary finds them more reliably than any list of suspects. The most important avoidable mistake is medication-overuse headache: acute painkillers taken on more than ten days a month create a constant headache of their own.
An acute drug works best in the first hour and at the full dose. Too late and too little is the commonest reason it seems not to help.
Acute drugs on no more than ten days a month, simple painkillers on no more than fifteen. Above that, prevention is needed rather than more tablets.
Date, duration, severity, medication, cycle, sleep. After two or three months your own pattern shows — and whether prevention is working.
The same sleeping hours, no skipped meals, enough to drink, endurance exercise three times a week. Unspectacular, but effective in studies.
A thunderclap headache, the worst of your life, headache with fever and a stiff neck, after a fall, with weakness or confusion, new after sixty — that needs checking at once and is not a question of migraine drugs.
Screen away, a large glass of water, 20 minutes in a quiet, darkened room; a cool cloth on the forehead or neck.
Bedroom at 16 to 19 degrees, genuinely dark, no screen in the last hour.
About fifteen in a hundred women and six in a hundred men have migraine. It usually starts between fifteen and thirty-five, and an untreated attack lasts four to seventy-two hours. After menopause it becomes markedly rarer for many women.
Triptans work during the attack, not as prevention — they act on the widened vessels and the trigeminal nerve, and work best within the first hour. Preventive drugs (beta blockers, topiramate, amitriptyline, CGRP antibodies) need six to twelve weeks and count as successful when attacks halve — not when they stop. A painkiller taken on more than ten days a month builds, over months, into a headache of its own.
The same word stands for two entirely different things: the neurological forewarning and the handed-down energy field. Both stand side by side in the Body language tool, with what can be said about each.
That is what separates it from tension headache, which presses on both sides and does not worsen with movement. Climbing stairs is a simple test.
Wanting to withdraw into a dark, quiet room is almost the diagnosis in itself.
Shimmering or zigzags that travel over minutes and pass within an hour. A first-ever episode needs checking — sudden and without spreading argues against an aura.
Yawning, food cravings, a stiff neck, irritability, passing water often. They are the best moment for the acute drug — the earlier it is taken, the better it works.
From two days before to three days after the start, attacks cluster because oestrogen falls. These attacks are often longer and more severe.
This is usually not the migraine progressing but medication-overuse headache. It recedes when the acute drugs are paused for a while — with support, not alone.
No value makes the diagnosis — the description of the attacks does. An iron shortage often comes with it, though, and lowers the threshold, especially with heavy periods.
The blood value underestimates a shortage, because most magnesium sits inside the cells. It belongs alongside nonetheless when cramps in the calf and a twitching eyelid come too.
An underactive thyroid can make headaches more frequent and at the same time explains tiredness and feeling cold. It is simple to check.
Individual — histamine filter can help.
Lowers attack frequency in studies — especially where stress is a trigger.
Often confused with feverfew, which has been studied for migraine prevention — they are two different plants. Mugwort itself has no such data and does not belong in pregnancy.
On the temples as soon as it starts. With migraine the effect is smaller than with tension headache, but the application costs nothing and disturbs no other treatment.
The most-named point for headache of the Liver type — between the first and second toe. In migraine studies the difference from sham needling was small, that from no treatment marked.
At the back of the head where the neck muscles attach. The place is the same one physiotherapy works on — the explanations differ, the grip is the same.
TCM does not treat a disease picture but a pattern: the same migraine gets two different treatments in two people. That is why TCM fits badly into studies.
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