Pain Killers Cause Migraine - Migraine Research

To the millions of Americans who are cursed with the migraine, the pain involved easily belongs in the dreaded group inhabited by labor pains and tooth drilling. Actually, migraine belongs in a class all its own, because the standard analgesicsthat would be useful in those conditions, are never effective with a migraine. Most people who suffer from migraines, often go through the ritual of trying at least a dozen different kinds of pain medication before coming by something that addresses the specific kind of pain they suffer from. Most scientists involved in migraine research say in addition, that migraine is often poorly diagnosed, and patients don't really get the help they deserve from their healthcare professionals. The only thing that seems to come standard for migraine is the pain.

But what is it about the migraine that makes it so hard to pin down, even for professionals involved in migraine research? The thing is, a migraine is not a headache. Most of the time, the cause is genetic, something inherited from your parents. What is worse, a headache is only one of the symptoms you need to endure; there can be nausea and sight disturbances in addition. The pain can often look confusingly close to pain usually found in sinus related problems, sight related problems, or epilepsy. And migraines in different people do not react the same way to medication.

With all the painstaking migraine research that has been put in, there is only one piece of concrete information: early intervention is about the best thing you can do for your migraine. If you have a situation that does not easily respond to over-the-counter medication, getting yourself to a headache specialist would be doing yourself a big favor. Leaving a migraine untreated often makes you more and more sensitive to pain as time wears on. The same problem could give you a whole lot more pain five years down the line. If over-the-counter migraine medicine does help with the pain, and you need to take them two or three times a week, you're again setting yourself up for rebound headaches, the pain you get from overexposure to painkillers.

Migraine research is uncovering now that overexposure to painkillers can often change the very chemistry of the brain, sometimes even the biology of the brain. The first thing you should do when you approach a neurologist for your migraine, is to ask how much experience they have in treating migraines. If you can find a certified headache specialist, so much the better. And if you find such a doctor, you can test their commitment by the amount of time they spend with you. About an hour on the first visit should be standard. Doctors often have the curious habit of working out of a preconception; if the doctor is championing stress as the cause of most human afflictions, they are unlikely to want to think of anything else for you. They should be flexible ideally, and try to see if there are other underlying illnesses, perhaps Lyme disease or a tumor if your migraine is indeed the primary kind. For no reason other than a preconception, they go ahead and prescribe you one of a group of seven Triptan drugs. Often, one or the other works for everyone.

There are also preventive medicines available for migraine. Migraine research is about the toughest field of exploration open today. And yet, this debilitating disease shows no real sign of yielding to the effort.