Posted on 07/05/2011 9:08:56 AM PDT by decimon
JACKSON, Miss. - Treating chronic migraines with behavioral approaches - such as relaxation training, hypnosis and biofeedback - can make financial sense compared to prescription-drug treatment, especially after a year or more, a new study found.
Longtime behavioral therapy researcher and practitioner Dr. Donald Penzien, University of Mississippi Medical Center professor of psychiatry, coauthored the study. He said the costs of prescription prophylactic drugs - the kind chronic migraine sufferers take every day to prevent onset - may not seem much even at several dollars a day.
"But those costs keep adding up with additional doctor visits and more prescriptions," Penzien said. "The cost of behavioral treatment is front-loaded. You go to a number of treatment sessions but then that's it. And the benefits last for years."
Published in the June issue of the journal Headache, the study compared the costs over time of several types of behavioral treatments with prescription-drug treatments. The research team included investigators from Wake Forest University, UMMC and the University of Mississippi.
The researchers found that after six months, the cost of minimal-contact behavioral treatment was competitive with pharmacologic treatments using drugs costing 50 cents or less a day. Minimal-contact treatment is when a patient sees a therapist a few times but largely practices the behavioral techniques at home, aided by literature or audio recordings.
After one year, the minimal-contact method was nearly $500 cheaper than pharmacologic treatment.
(Excerpt) Read more at publicaffairs.umc.edu ...
Feed your head ping.
Why am i suspicious that this is just cost-cutting by the Let-’Em-Die Administration?
The doctors have tried me on different meds and different therapies, but they don't work. They will have to pry my migraine meds out of my cold dead hands.
I’ve suffered from migraines my entire life. They run in my family. This is a vascular headache which occurs in the same location each time, and the pain pulses with each heart beat. A few have been so painful that they make me throw up.
Anyway, nothing works on them except one single thing, and that is Goody’s Headache Powder. Not BC, not Stanback, not tylenol, not coedine, not morphine, not fiorinal, but Goody’s. It’s very cheap, very effective, and I carry it where ever I go.
Found a very old cure...Lemonade
MMMM lemonade :P’’’’
I’m not sur ehow it would work though, for me it’s got to be something that opens the constricted vessel.
My neurologist just about laughed me out of office when I suggested this as a possible treatment. We’ve tried everything else so I figured it was worth a try. Not all migraines are stress-related. (Mine aren’t.)
Lemonade.....increases blood flow...
As you may have guessed, I didn’t know that :P
I am mainly a tea drinker now, but I will give lemonade a shot, as aspirin is harsh on the liver.
Now the trick will be to find some bottled lemonade that does not contain accursed high fructose corn syrup -_-
In migraines, the blood vessels are swollen rather than constricted. Prophylactic migraine meds like Imitrex, Maxalt, etc. constrict the vessels to counter the swelling. Caffeine can also help a migraine.
In headaches, the blood vessels are constricted. So standard prophylactic migraine meds will make a h/a worse. Likewise caffeine is bad for h/a.
I’ve suffered from migraines for years. Maxalt is my emergency drug of choice, but sometimes the only thing left is Vicodin, a large ice pack, and a very dark, very quiet room.
Migraines and headaches suck. Seems like we’d have cured the common cold and head pain by now.
Cluster headache is 10 times as intense as migraine. The only thing they have in common is that vasoconstrictors work on both of them. Also with CH, hyperventilating with pure O2 will rapidly constrict the blood vessels, allowing the sufferer to abort an attack in 5-10 minutes.
lemonade and high doses of vitamin d3 and fish oil. one of the best preventatives around. something about changing the arterial pH along with anti-inflammatory properties.
You can probably find more info on the web. I found it in an 1850 medical book. My daughter gets migraines. I think I remember...half a glass...wait 30 minutes...other half of the glass.
Hmmm, swollen. I hadn’t considered that, but it makes sense though. Sometimes a cup of strong coffee helps my headache, but other times I have to resort to the goody’s which also contains 32.5 mg of caffeine.
I have never found that a vicodin has any effect on it though, but a dark quiet room helps tremendously, but sometimes not.
The worst migraine I had occurred one night about 300 am. It had woken me up, I knew I was out of goody’s, so I jus tried to endure. But it was so painful that I simply could not lay my head on the pillow.
The headache always occurs in the same spot, the right rear base of my skull. This particular time, the pulsing pain was so intense that I could not lift my head. I knew I had to get some goody’s, no choice. So I left, got in my truck at 300 am and went to Texaco on Carrolton and Claiborne in New Orleans. This was the last Texaco you’d ever want to go to at 300 am.
I dunno how I even got there, could not lift my head, could barely see, got accosted for donations as I approached the window, fun stuff. But I got the Goody’s and a coke for extra caffeine. Realizing that this was the grand daddy of all migraines, I took 2 powders straight off. That headache was gone in 5 minutes flat! It was after that night that I always, always carry two goody’s in my wallet.
Most M.D.s today, particularly specialists, are fairly narrow minded when it comes to treatment by any other way than chemical. I’m sure there are some folks for whom the pharmaceuticals provide their only relief, and that’s fine. But if someone has gone the drug route, and it isn’t working, why NOT try something else? Everyone is different, so it might work for some, but not for others.
Find a health food store, Trader Joe's, or Whole Foods. There are companies that use cane sugar, not corn syrup, and those stores always carry at least one line of drinks from one of those companies. Or you can make it yourself, using fresh squeezed lemon juice, and simple syrup made from cane or raw sugar.
Been there, done that 3:00 AM road trip for caffeine. One time I had to tie an ice pack around my head and take a Home Depot bucket with me to pull over and vomit along the way. I’m glad Goody’s works for you so well. It’s waaaaay less expensive than Maxalt etc. A ziplock bag of crushed ice at the source of the pain will help the swelling too.
I think making it fresh and using a sweetener like Stevia would be best for me, since I’m a diabetic.
I can consume sugar, and I’ve got the diabetes under maximum security lock down right now, but I gotta do that very carefuly, bc I don’t want to go getting used to it again.
I had headaches that started in my traps and ascended to my head. Took biofeedback lessons and, in addition to learning to relax, learned to alter my heart rate and blood pressure as well. Used to mess w/the ER people—after a while, it got old and they’d just snap, “Stop that!” It did relieve the headaches, though.
About 15 years after that, studied qi gong (chi kung) w/a Chinese grandmaster. It took me six months to learn the entire form, but I never had another headache (has been 15 years now.) He was surprised that that was a collateral effect of the exercise. That discipline has benefitted me tremendously.
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