Ep 126 Migraine: A Cacophony in Four Movements

This Podcast Will Kill You

Exactly Right and iHeartPodcasts

Health & Fitness, Science

4.8 • 17.1K Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2023

⏱️ 106 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Throbbing, pulsating pain.” “Like a drill boring into your head.” “As though your head is gripped by a vise.” “Stabbing pain hammering through your brain.” There is no shortage of metaphors used to describe the horrific, incapacitating pain of migraines. But try as we might, can any of them truly convey what it feels like to be at the mercy of such pain? In many ways, migraines reveal our shortcomings: with language that fails to accurately describe pain, with empathy when we continue to dismiss migraines as “just really bad headaches”, with medicine as we struggle to find reliable treatments and preventatives, and with biology as we fail to understand the complete pathology of this condition. In this episode, we do our best to explore these shortcomings by deep diving into what we do know about the biology and history of migraines. Why do some people get migraines and others don’t? How do certain medications work? What the heck is going on with aura? Have migraines always been around? How have people dealt with them or perceived them historically? What’s on the horizon for migraines in the future? As always, we’ve got lots of questions and lots of answers for you, so tune in today!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is exactly right.
0:06.0	Many put their hope in Dr. Serhat.
0:09.0	His company was worth half a billion dollars.
0:11.0	His research promised groundbreaking treatments for
0:14.3	HIV and cancer, but the brilliant doctor was hiding a secret. You can listen to
0:20.0	Dr Death, bad magic, exclusively an ad free by subscribing to Wendry Plus in the Wendry app.
0:26.8	My name is Kaylee.
0:28.2	I've been getting migrain since I was a kid, but over the last eight years or or so it's become a battle against chronic
0:35.6	daily migraines the singular worst pain I've ever felt in my life I will never
0:41.2	forget it it was January 2019 at 3 a.m. during a blizzard, I woke up with a 10 out of 10
0:50.0	pan scale migraine, which is the kind where you worry that maybe this time it's actually something more serious, like a stroke or a meningitis.
0:57.0	It takes a lot to get me out of my bed, to drive myself to the hospital during a snowstorm to get an IV shoved in my arm.
1:07.0	Hopefully that gives some indication of how miserable these things are. They're not just
1:11.9	headaches. For every day that I have actual migraine pain, there's a period
1:15.3	afterwards of what I call the migraine hangover where you're just completely drained and foggy and the nausea can be horrific and I get really sensitive to
1:26.0	smells both as a trigger and in terms of getting phantom smells before a migraine
1:32.1	hits which is bizarre, it could be a totally
1:35.8	debilitating thing, and it could be really hard to feel like you're being taken seriously
1:40.9	because it's invisible.
1:43.5	It's incredibly frustrating to have to cancel plans or call off work
1:48.1	because you have another migraine.
1:51.2	But sometimes over the counters or even your prescription migraine medicine just still isn't enough to make you functional enough to go about your day.
	...

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