A few years ago I suffered from an extremely severe case of repetitive strain injury/tendinitis. (As far as I can tell, attempts by medical professionals to come up with careful definitions for those terms have mostly failed, so I use them interchangeably.) My case was more severe than almost any I have ever heard about—I was stuck controlling my computer using a voice recognition system for over a year and spent all of my time being unemployed, depressed, and living with my parents. What finally solved my problem was information about trigger points found in this book and this ebook. I actually purchased the first book relatively early on in my condition, because I wanted to try everything, but I was convinced it was pseudoscience and put it down after only a couple minutes of reading. It was only the skeptical tone and citations in the second ebook that convinced me trigger points were a thing. Since my experience, I’ve talked to other people with chronic RSI, mostly within the Less Wrong community, and my current guess is that trigger points are responsible for most chronic RSIs, as well as a wide variety of chronic pain problems that science currently isn’t very good at treating (the same trigger point therapy that was useful for my tendinitis was also very useful for my chronic knee pain, stomach pain, and back pain).
I mention this because the first book I linked to cites trigger points as a possible cause of migraines. I recommend searching for migraine info using the index. There’s also this web page by the author of the second ebook.
If trigger points are a significant factor in your migraines, I expect that you will find the right massage therapy or acupuncture treatments helpful, and in the best case they will clear your condition up entirely with clever and diligent application, although they will aggravate your condition a bit initially (for maybe a couple days after treatment; this is discussed more in the resources I pointed you to). (This great textbook explains how acupuncture works.)
(Unfortunately my latest chronic pain condition is eyestrain, which is not capitulating as easy as the previous ones; the muscles in my eyes are not accessible for massage the way most of the muscles in my body are. I’ve been doing self-acupuncture (after reading lots of safety information) to try to relax the smooth muscle tissue innervated by both my eyes and areas accessible to a needle (it’d be really spiffy if I could talk to someone who has expertise in neuroanatomy) and it seems helpful but it hasn’t been a slam dunk. Wrote this post mostly using a screen reader so I wouldn’t have to look at my screen very much.)
That sounds quite promising. I’ve heard a bit about acupuncture, and its on my countries national health service, so I’ll give it a go.
Apparently some research has been done on this, which has shed some light on the subject, but its not yet been able to explain it all. Apparently its pretty difficult to perform a quality experiment to check hypothesis about acupuncture.
Thanks for the advice. No one else recommended it, and I had put acupuncture fairly low on my to try list. If you hadn’t recommended it, I probably wouldn’t have thought of it for a while.
A few years ago I suffered from an extremely severe case of repetitive strain injury/tendinitis. (As far as I can tell, attempts by medical professionals to come up with careful definitions for those terms have mostly failed, so I use them interchangeably.) My case was more severe than almost any I have ever heard about—I was stuck controlling my computer using a voice recognition system for over a year and spent all of my time being unemployed, depressed, and living with my parents. What finally solved my problem was information about trigger points found in this book and this ebook. I actually purchased the first book relatively early on in my condition, because I wanted to try everything, but I was convinced it was pseudoscience and put it down after only a couple minutes of reading. It was only the skeptical tone and citations in the second ebook that convinced me trigger points were a thing. Since my experience, I’ve talked to other people with chronic RSI, mostly within the Less Wrong community, and my current guess is that trigger points are responsible for most chronic RSIs, as well as a wide variety of chronic pain problems that science currently isn’t very good at treating (the same trigger point therapy that was useful for my tendinitis was also very useful for my chronic knee pain, stomach pain, and back pain).
I mention this because the first book I linked to cites trigger points as a possible cause of migraines. I recommend searching for migraine info using the index. There’s also this web page by the author of the second ebook.
If trigger points are a significant factor in your migraines, I expect that you will find the right massage therapy or acupuncture treatments helpful, and in the best case they will clear your condition up entirely with clever and diligent application, although they will aggravate your condition a bit initially (for maybe a couple days after treatment; this is discussed more in the resources I pointed you to). (This great textbook explains how acupuncture works.)
(Unfortunately my latest chronic pain condition is eyestrain, which is not capitulating as easy as the previous ones; the muscles in my eyes are not accessible for massage the way most of the muscles in my body are. I’ve been doing self-acupuncture (after reading lots of safety information) to try to relax the smooth muscle tissue innervated by both my eyes and areas accessible to a needle (it’d be really spiffy if I could talk to someone who has expertise in neuroanatomy) and it seems helpful but it hasn’t been a slam dunk. Wrote this post mostly using a screen reader so I wouldn’t have to look at my screen very much.)
There’s also http://smile.amazon.com/Trigger-Point-Therapy-Headaches-Migraines/dp/1572245255?sa-no-redirect=1
That sounds quite promising. I’ve heard a bit about acupuncture, and its on my countries national health service, so I’ll give it a go.
Apparently some research has been done on this, which has shed some light on the subject, but its not yet been able to explain it all. Apparently its pretty difficult to perform a quality experiment to check hypothesis about acupuncture.
Thanks for the advice. No one else recommended it, and I had put acupuncture fairly low on my to try list. If you hadn’t recommended it, I probably wouldn’t have thought of it for a while.
No prob. I recommend looking in to self-massage as well as acupuncture. The trigger point books discuss massage as the primary treatment method.
You might be interested in massage tools like this one: http://smile.amazon.com/Still-Point-Inducer-Original-Congestion/dp/B000P9BTCY/ref=zg_bs_16303031_20
Random link that might suck: http://exploreim.ucla.edu/chinese-medicine/acupressure-point-gb20/