Conventional treatments for migraine headaches have progressed along way in the past several years.
As little as twenty years ago, if you walked into your health care providers office complaining of a migraine headache,
the best he could do was empathize with you. There just were not any effective conventional treatments to help.
Relief from migraine
Today the medical community is armed with a number of solutions for your pain.
Some of these have been specifically developed for the alleviation of the symptoms of a migraine headache.
Others are drugs which are used for a variety of health conditions other than migraine headaches..
Your health care provider may recommend you undergo what is called acute or abortive therapy.
This merely means that he will ask you take certain drugs when the migraine attack occurs
which may be able to halt the symptoms once they have already begun.
Specific pain-relieving medications include nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs also known as NSAIDs.
The most commonly used of this class of drugs include ibuprofen, sold as over-the-counter remedies under
the brand names of Advil and Motrin.
Another NSAID is aspirin. You may even find that some of these medications include caffeine as in the case of Excedrin Migraine.
These drugs usually seem to work fine for moderate headaches, but are not effective at all when the pain of a migraine worsens.
Your health care provider may recommend a stronger version of this class of drugs, one in which you can only obtain with a prescription.
While this may appear as a solution, you must keep in mind that the prolonged use of this class of medications can lead to some serious,
adverse side effects.
If used too long, these drugs have been known to cause ulcers as well as gastrointestinal bleeding in some people.
Ironically, the same medications taken to resolve the pain may also cause rebound headaches in certain individuals,
only making the problem worse.
There are also drugs that are tailored specifically to relief the pain unique to a migraine headache.
These are called triptans and are increasingly becoming the drug of choice for many health care providers.
They not only relieve the pain, but they also help to reduce the nausea and the light sensitivity that many complain of.
Here again, though, while this sounds like a blessing for migraine suffers,
you need to discuss with your health care provider all the possible side effects these drugs bring with them.
They include: nausea, dizziness, muscle weakness and in more serious cases, even stroke or heart attack.
Relief from migraine
In addition to this he may also provide you with a variety of preventive medications.
These may require that you take them on a regular basis,
usually once a day in order to prevent the headache completely or at least reduce the severity or frequency of the problem.
These drugs may include those originally designed for use on cardiovascular problems
or they may be antidepressants or even anti-seizure drugs.
The approach your health care provider uses depends on several factors,
including the severity of the pain and the corresponding degree of disability you experience
as well as the frequency of the headaches.
Some experts, for example, explain that an individual is a candidate for preventive therapy
if you experience at least two debilitating attacks a month or
if you are otherwise forced to take some type of pain-relieving medication more than twice a week.
Other reasons you may be placed on preventive therapy include an unusually long
time period of numbness or impaired movement on one side of your body,or the existence of an unusually prolong aura.
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