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feldmanAs a part-time dilettante migraineur, I fall in the cracks of most treatment plans. I get them just enough to need an abortive, but not nearly enough to justify the side-effects of a preventive.
They can be terrifyingly bad and vomitous, but most attacks fall into the bad headache category these days, for a variety of reasons that all stem from 1. no longer living paycheck to paycheck and 2. being able to afford, time and money-wise, the habits that help keep them at bay (regular sleep, medical care, anabolic exercise instead of catabolic work-exhaustion, cutting back on grinding my teeth, new eyeglasses, etc.).
[aside: seriously, the amount of life infrastructure rebuilding we've done in the last two years, that we hadn't had the scratch to do since years before the Great Recession, is itself an indictment of the Neo-Gilded Age; ameliorating chronic treatable conditions shouldn't be a luxury].
I also aggressively treat impending symptoms before the pain gains momentum, which I started doing in the years when my only option for a full-on headache was the carefully hoarded stash of random leftover opiates from unrelated injuries and surgeries. Go to bed early with an ice pack pillow now, skip the codeine for a truly rainy day down the line. I treat my brain like a formula one machine, giving it numerous indulgent pit stops so it doesn't overheat, blow a tire, etc. There's only so much ibuprofen my gut can take, after all. So I ice liberally, I monitor caffeine levels to keep it as a tool I can use and not another withdrawal trigger, I meditate, I exercise, I massage my head and neck with tingly things to relax the muscles and keep tension from piling on. It's a whole toolkit, because my Rx options are kinda sucky since I stopped tolerating triptans.
I've been trying out cannabidiol lately, with mixed success. The sublingual oil has been showing promise, so I gritted my teeth and ordered a vape to see what sharpening the delivery curve would do.
Spouse: your package arrived, more oil?
Me: no *sigh* this time I got the vape sampler
Spouse: dooooouuuuuuche
Me: yeah, I need to find a YouTube tutorial to figure out how to use it
Spouse: dooooooorrrrrrrrrk
The upside is that it seems to turn a moderate attack into a mild one, and seriously reduces the amount of ibuprofen needed for relief. Is this placebo? Only time and record-keeping will tell. The downsides are threefold. First, I haven't had a severe attack yet to see how it fares against a raging puker, so I hate to get my hopes up. Second, sifting through the sketchy fad-pseudo-science to find decent studies is very difficult, as is finding reputable suppliers with lab-tested product, dialing in dosages wrt route of delivery, etc. Third, while my state is technically recreation legal now, the market won't be up and running this year, so any further exploration of whether the addition of full spectrum stuff with appreciable THC will assist in aborting a rager will have to wait until 2020.
And neither upside nor downside: this totally slots into my overlapping fixation circles of biology and scent/flavor, which means I've spent the last couple days looking at oils where the CBD is blended with additional cannabinoids and terpenes to try to replicate the effects of different strains. I'm rather certain that medically it's bullshit, but I'm intrigued by the idea nonetheless. It's science as long as you write shit down and do the analysis, I guess.
They can be terrifyingly bad and vomitous, but most attacks fall into the bad headache category these days, for a variety of reasons that all stem from 1. no longer living paycheck to paycheck and 2. being able to afford, time and money-wise, the habits that help keep them at bay (regular sleep, medical care, anabolic exercise instead of catabolic work-exhaustion, cutting back on grinding my teeth, new eyeglasses, etc.).
[aside: seriously, the amount of life infrastructure rebuilding we've done in the last two years, that we hadn't had the scratch to do since years before the Great Recession, is itself an indictment of the Neo-Gilded Age; ameliorating chronic treatable conditions shouldn't be a luxury].
I also aggressively treat impending symptoms before the pain gains momentum, which I started doing in the years when my only option for a full-on headache was the carefully hoarded stash of random leftover opiates from unrelated injuries and surgeries. Go to bed early with an ice pack pillow now, skip the codeine for a truly rainy day down the line. I treat my brain like a formula one machine, giving it numerous indulgent pit stops so it doesn't overheat, blow a tire, etc. There's only so much ibuprofen my gut can take, after all. So I ice liberally, I monitor caffeine levels to keep it as a tool I can use and not another withdrawal trigger, I meditate, I exercise, I massage my head and neck with tingly things to relax the muscles and keep tension from piling on. It's a whole toolkit, because my Rx options are kinda sucky since I stopped tolerating triptans.
I've been trying out cannabidiol lately, with mixed success. The sublingual oil has been showing promise, so I gritted my teeth and ordered a vape to see what sharpening the delivery curve would do.
Spouse: your package arrived, more oil?
Me: no *sigh* this time I got the vape sampler
Spouse: dooooouuuuuuche
Me: yeah, I need to find a YouTube tutorial to figure out how to use it
Spouse: dooooooorrrrrrrrrk
The upside is that it seems to turn a moderate attack into a mild one, and seriously reduces the amount of ibuprofen needed for relief. Is this placebo? Only time and record-keeping will tell. The downsides are threefold. First, I haven't had a severe attack yet to see how it fares against a raging puker, so I hate to get my hopes up. Second, sifting through the sketchy fad-pseudo-science to find decent studies is very difficult, as is finding reputable suppliers with lab-tested product, dialing in dosages wrt route of delivery, etc. Third, while my state is technically recreation legal now, the market won't be up and running this year, so any further exploration of whether the addition of full spectrum stuff with appreciable THC will assist in aborting a rager will have to wait until 2020.
And neither upside nor downside: this totally slots into my overlapping fixation circles of biology and scent/flavor, which means I've spent the last couple days looking at oils where the CBD is blended with additional cannabinoids and terpenes to try to replicate the effects of different strains. I'm rather certain that medically it's bullshit, but I'm intrigued by the idea nonetheless. It's science as long as you write shit down and do the analysis, I guess.
no subject
Date: 2019-05-26 08:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-26 08:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-27 03:13 am (UTC)One of the problems with cannabis-related research at the moment is the weird legal classifications it's under - it's very hard for people to study it in more than small, poorly selected group. But I think everyone's hoping that with Canada bringing in relatively sensible nation-wide laws that the quality and quantity of research will improve.
no subject
Date: 2019-05-27 03:42 pm (UTC)I sure hope so!
(And I really hope someone/some groups are tracking all that info at the national level, even though the legislation is actually provincial--which is to say, the feds announced cannabis was going to be legalized and left it to the provinces to all sort the details out individually, and I gather that's something of a mixed bag.)
no subject
Date: 2019-05-27 04:02 pm (UTC)I agree that I'm excited about the potential for better research. The studies done in the US previously were not only strictly controlled as to the hypotheses, they also had to use a government strain grown in one official location, which at this point is arguably as relevant to real world conditions as using heirloom tomatoes grown behind one particular garage in Milwaukee.
There's already some decent work coming out of the re-classification in up north, this is an interesting article from a migraine specialist collaborating with Cleveland Clinic and also Tilray, which is a medical cannabis company in Canada. So then one gets into the concerns with dodgy corporate science, though arguably Tilray is not doing well enough in the market to be that kind of savvy.
I've also marked this journal for a deeper look, but they do seem to be peer-reviewed and the publisher positioned against fly-by-night pay-for-pub journals. I think that's where I found the article discussing historical use patterns.