It is possible to have a mild migraine.
I would never say this out loud because people would start throwing things at me. I’m only saying it on my blog because I know how difficult it is to throw a rotten tomato through a computer screen.
People feel pretty strongly about this. Evidently, if you’re not on your back in a dark room praying for death, you do not have a migraine.
Still, it’s possible to have a mild migraine. It’s also possible to have a mild heart attack. No one goes, “You mean you didn’t have a triple bypass?? That was no heart attack!”
I power through my headaches. They’re not debilitating. They’re still migraines, though, and I still hate them. On my worst days, I kind of just sit around thinking things like “Why can’t I just have this part of my head surgically removed I bet I could find some guy who practices medicine out of a back office in a former warehouse in Russia who got his degree from the University of Fake Medicine who would be totally willing to do it.”
Mostly, though, they’re not debilitating.
Anyway, I didn’t come here to moan about my headaches, which in all probability are not as bad as like 95% of the headaches experienced by the three people who will read this and try to throw a tomato through their screen.
But I have to say something about this magical miracle migraine medication I just recently discovered that probably everyone else who gets migraines already knew about, and frankly I’m kinda pissed off about it because I’ve had this stuff in my house for the last 30 years and no one ever told me it could fix a headache.
It’s habanero sauce.
While I was doing some work for a client last week I stumbled on a study involving migraineurs
and capsaicin cream. Evidently, if you put topical capsaicin on the heads of people with migraines 11 out of 17 of them will have a greater than 50% reduction in pain. Who knew.
So like five minutes later, after I’d finished placing my order for capsaicin cream, I read something else that said you can use capsaicin nasal spray to abort a migraine. Roughly five minutes after that, when I was done placing my order for capsaicin nasal spray, well, nothing happened. I actually just went to bed.
But then, a couple of days later — before either of my new miracle remedies arrived in the mail — I got a migraine. So I went to my kitchen pantry and found a bottle of habanero hot sauce, and I put it on my head. Then I made myself some ginger tea and I put habanero sauce in it. Then, for good measure, I … used it as nasal spray. Yep. Twenty minutes later my headache was a pale shadow of itself. It wasn’t completely gone, but it was much, much better. I smelled like a jerk chicken taco, but I felt better.
Cure? I don’t know. Could just be the placebo effect. I won’t know until I try the pharmaceutically formulated stuff. That’s the problem with all these remedies — they work for some people and not for others. They work on some headache days, but not on others. Or they work for a while, then they don’t work anymore. But I will say, the habanero sauce was at least better than zolmitriptan, which generally makes me feel like I’m having a heart attack. A mild one.
By the way yes, habanero sauce in your nose hurts like hell. But it beats having some guy in Russia remove part of your head.
Header photo “habanero peppers” by Crystalline Radical is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
