As everybody knows migraine is mostly a one sided severe vascular headache that comes in attacks. An attack is often accompanied by nausea and vomiting. There are many sorts of triggers. During the attack you may experience other symptoms and signs You can read a lot about it on internet but in this article I would like to tell about one important aspect. It is about the negative results if you use medicines without caution.
There are two types of drugs that are used; either to treat the attack or to prevent it. Examples of the first category are the analgesics (paracetamol, aspirin, diclofenac, naproxen and ibuprofen) and the relative new generation of triptans which abort the attack. Examples of the prophylactic types are the beta blockers, antidepressants, anticonvulsants, NSAIDs and calcium channel blockers.
What happens in the practice is the following. After you are diagnosed as a migraine patient, you get an advice from your GP or the neurologist. Of course we are lucky to have the wonderful medicines that I mentioned to help easing the pain and make it bearable while you have an incurable headache. Today Our life is nowadays very stressful we have to work hard in order to earn or not to lose our jobs. What we do that we forget about ourselves. We do everything consciously and unconsciously to keep on good achievements. A lot of migraine patients will take extra medicines and frequently in order to prevent of abort the attacks. They may use the analgesics and triptans to prevent the attack. Usually these are meant to be used against the attack. After a time your body will be saturated with those medicines. You will take more in order to get the same results. Your body will get some kind of addiction or saturation. The medicines which were used to help, are now causing unresolved headache. You will not dare to stop swallowing them as you will feel not safe and afraid that you will get migraine while you are busy with your work or certain activity. You will be in a difficult situation. Unfortunately, you will try to use other medicines. Even your GP will prescribe and try other new medicines. The situation will only get worst. You may try the alternative medicine (homeopathy, acupuncture en others) and you will experience some improvement which will fade away very fast; I will explain later on why!
What to do now?
From my experience and practice you will need to make a plan for yourself if you can or together with your GP. You have to stop all the medicine immediately, no matter how hard it sounds but this is the only solution otherwise you will never be free of pain. It will be very difficult times for you and your family. You may take a leave from your work to fight the pain without tablets in this process of detoxification. In many situations such a patient will need to be admitted for few days to be supervised in these hard days. Your GP can help you with a short course of medicine against anxiety(and not for the pain) to start the process. The healing will take from few weeks to few months. You will feel a lot better. You have to be strong and go on. I am not saying that you will not need medicines later on but you will be wiser in using them.
The temporary improvement with alternative medicine can be explained in 2 ways. One is that you will be supported psychologically and socially, you find some intelligent person that listens to you and try to understand your problems. Secondly is that you will believe in that therapy and you will use unconsciously less medicine and will feel some relief. Funny! Isn't it?
Please consider the following: what I have mentioned in this article can not be applied to every migraine or headache patient but I assure you that this can be applied to a lot of patients. At least with those who frequently use tablets. Never ignore the initial diagnosis of your GP. A good doctor is a must to exclude any organic cause of your headache other than the common vascular and tension headaches. You can think about simple and bad causes.
Feel free to visit my forum if you would like to talk about your experience with headache and may be to discuss how you are going to try what I mentioned in this short article. Good luck.
