The Migraine Relief Center Blog

It’s a fact that migraines occur more often in women than in men. The reasons for this range from estrogen levels associated with menopause, through exposure to irritants. Could it also be that female patients are more likely to style their hair than men are, using equipment that might trigger a headache? It’s possible, and although this remains unproven we can recommend finding hairstyles less likely to put a strain on your head and cause pain.

Natural medicines to relieve headache and other pain dates back thousands of years, and plenty of evidence exists that healers in cultures such as ancient Egyptian and Chinese made use of herbs and other plants for this purpose. In spite of the advances in modern medicine, many people prefer to use natural remedies to combat their pain. Some reasons for this are:

Medical science learns more about migraine every day, and one of the findings to come out of recent years is that there is a connection between migraine and stroke, especially an ischaemic or clot-based stroke. While strokes and migraines have some symptoms in common, there’s no indication that the one is caused by the other or vice versa. What has been shown, however, is that the risk of stroke is slightly higher for migraine patients than for non-migraineurs, particularly under certain...

Migraine sufferers are accustomed to the pain and light sensitivity that accompany attacks. Around 75 percent also experience noise sensitivity, which includes quiet sounds as well as loud. Studies show this affects male and female patients although women are more sensitive to sound. Patients older than 60 years have lower sound sensitivity levels, possibly caused by compromised hearing. Some patients find they lose the ability to hear for the duration of the migraine, while others discover...

A sudden, stabbing pain in your face or head feels like you'e being attacked with a sharp object. It arrives without warning and is short, sharp and intensely uncomfortable for up to 30 seconds. You've just experienced an "ice pick" headache, and the bad news is that it could recur several times during the day. The official name given to these attacks by the International Headache Society is a Primary Stabbing Headache, and they can occur in migraineurs and non-sufferers alike even when no...

Getting enough sleep is important for most people, but for migraineurs the quality of sleep can have as much impact on their wellbeing as the quantity. A 2016 study by an outpatient headache clinic in Taiwan showed a significant association between the quality of the respondents’ sleep and the frequency of their migraines, which indicates that improving the quality of sleep can also reduce patients’ suffering from migraines. Some of the connections between migraine and poor quality sleep...

Are you dreading New Year’s Eve? Does the thought of all the extra excitement and noise give you visions of pain to come? For many migraine sufferers, the party season is nothing to be celebrated. With many New Year’s Eve parties getting noisier and more frenetic as the evening wears on, this special celebration can end up crossed firmly off the social diary.

While the association between temperature, changes in temperature, and migraine headaches are not fully understood, around 75% of migraine sufferers cite temperature change as one of their triggers.

Women’s migraine patterns often have their roots in monthly, hormonal fluctuations, where changes in body chemistry cause imbalances that result in headaches. Many women find headaches are worse either during, before, or just after their periods as it is during this time that estrogen levels dip. Some schools of thought assert that it is not the level of estrogen in the body that causes the headache, but rather the change in the estrogen/progesterone balance.