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The holiday season is a challenge for everyone, with too few hours in the day and no let-up in everyday demands and commitments. Add on the frenzy of gift buying, food and drink shopping, event organization and the expectation that you WILL have a good time, and migraine sufferers often feel extra pressure and apprehension.
For some migraine sufferers, the choice between pain or medication isn’t always straightforward. For those with occasional headaches, the answer is far simpler: you have a headache so you take a painkiller and the headache goes away. Problem solved.
Light sensitivity creates an unpredictable trigger for migraine sufferers that can pounce without any warning, depending on the situation and circumstances. When aware that they are sensitive to light, sufferers often become anxious or fearful when they know a given situation could lead to an attack.
Since time began, mankind has searched for answers to physical issues. Migraines are an inconvenient, painful reality for so many Americans that it’s little wonder we’re looking constantly for ways to find relief. One of the newer and more unusual methods is daith piercing, which has some reputation for effectiveness against chronic headaches.
As our hormones can play a part in triggering a migraine, it’s no coincidence that more women than men suffer from migraine headaches, or that they’re more common in women during their reproductive years.
If anyone was ever in any doubt regarding the severity of migraine, they need only be pointed to a report produced by the World Health Organization (WHO). The report indicates that chronic daily headache (CDH), of which migraine is one type, is as disabling to sufferers as psychosis, quadriplegia, or dementia. Many sufferers find their migraines are controllable through conventional pain medications, but for a significant minority such treatments have little to no effect.
Migraine is far more than pain, with headache itself being just one of the symptoms. To non-migraine sufferers, migraine is simply a bad headache and this perception has freely percolated society causing confusion and misunderstanding. Newly diagnosed sufferers often struggle to make the connection between their mood swings and associated symptoms, not fully understanding how closely the two are related.
Migraine can be as unpredictable as a blind date, and is most likely to make its unwelcome appearance just when it’s most inconvenient. Important events like work meetings, job interviews, weddings or engagement parties can be especially scary for migraineurs and many avoid making commitments for fear of letting people down.
To many people who don’t suffer from migraine, the word migraine simply means a bad headache. Migraine sufferers know different. It is a complex disorder with many associated symptoms ranging from distressing to debilitating. As with all aspects of migraine, the aura is often misunderstood and minimized by those who have never experienced it.
There are a multitude of migraine side effects, with each sufferer having a slightly different experience. All these different experiences make migraine a complex condition, and hard to treat. Some people experience early warning signals, such as an aura causing a visual disturbance, feeling nauseous, or dizzy. Others experience a hammering pain that makes it impossible to carry on with life as normal.
