Heal Your Headache: The 1-2-3 Program for Taking Charge of Your Pain by David Buchholz

Author:David Buchholz [Buchholz, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: 0761125663
Publisher: Workman Publishing
Published: 2013-09-14T23:00:00+00:00

The Principles of Preventive Medication

With one minor exception, no medication used for migraine prevention was designed for this purpose. The discovery that certain medications can prevent migraine came from incidental observations of decreased headaches among people taking them for other purposes.

Exactly how these medications work to prevent migraine is unclear, but in effect they raise the threshold for migraine by blocking one or more neurotransmitters in their pathway. This makes the mechanism harder to trigger, or less fully activated even if it is triggered (see Figure 10, page 115). You can think of these medications as threshold elevators.

The effectiveness of any preventive medication depends on maintaining an adequate level in your system, which means you have to take it daily. As a general rule, preventive medications don’t work well after the fact; that is, they help to avoid the triggering of migraine but are less effective when taken after the mechanism has been set into motion.

Here are the guidelines for proper use of preventive medication. See Table 9 (page 112–13) for a medication that has a good chance of working. Try one at a time. Start with a low dosage to avoid initial side effects. Keep increasing the dosage slowly but steadily over a period of two months until you either achieve satisfactory headache control or hit the dosage ceiling. The therapeutic benefit of these medications is dose-related: the higher the dosage, the higher your threshold rises. Sometimes just a small increment in dosage is all it takes to raise your threshold above your trigger level and thereby control your headaches.

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