Tags
aura, brain blood flow, Finger tapping stops migraine, headache, Migraine, Migraine experiments update, prodrome, Scientific American
Migraine auras only happen every couple of months for me and were treated yesterday with my particular form of finger tapping. This was discussed in my blog Migraine cure – an aura event appeared to respond to an ice pack and tapping.
Yesterday, while walking the in meadows of South Lake Tahoe I had a migraine aura prodrome. In some ways it came on in the typical way, with the large donut of opaque sparkly lines around my central vision. What seemed unusual was that I was feeling more relaxed than normal because I was walking alone in a very peaceful grassy field. It was similar to Julie Andrews romp in the mountains singing, “The world is alive with the sound of music.” Perhaps, it was the bright light of being out in the open on a cloudless day which brought it on. In any case within a minute of first noticing the sparkles I was able to sit down under a pine tree and begin tapping the back of my head, side to side alternately, with the pads of my finger tips. I tapped firmly but lightly at a rate of about 10 per second. Five hits per hand per second. The force of the energy is toward the center of the back of my head behind the ears where the human visual centers are located. (If you bring your elbows up to the level of your to chin with the cups of your hands covering your ears, then your finger tips will be near the position I was using.) I did this for about ten seconds and then observed if there was any change in the aura. I thought maybe there was so I repeated. Ten seconds of tapping twenty seconds of observing the quality of the aura.
There was an effect. What happened was that the sparkly character of the doughnut turned into a soft-fuzzy-glowy doughnut. I repeated this procedure again — same effect. So, I kept on doing this for a couple of minutes while sitting otherwise quite peacefully under the tree. I don’t wear a watch anymore but the whole sparkly part of the event wasn’t more than five minutes and the fuzzy doughnut a couple minutes more at most. It was comfortable under the tree so I sat there for another half an hour, idly looking at the beautiful scenery and then walked down to the Lake Tahoe beach. (See at Google Earth 38.9429 -119.9922)
This was the mildest migraine aura event I have ever had but it is worth reporting because if this works for other people it will save a lot of annoyance and suffering.
Pingback: Fun experiments with your eyes « Probaway – Life Hacks
It is great to find a site with syggestions and experience on how to cope with aura.
I have suffered on and off from migraine aura since my thirties (twenty years now). Sometimes I’ll get no attacks for as long as eighteen months, sometimes I start getting it twice or more a week, or any frequency in between. My doctor basically told me just to put up with it and be thankful I just got the pro-drome and never any serious pain afterwards, but my auras tend to be long – up to forty minutes, sometimes stopping and starting again from the other side so last week it was an hour and a half altogether, and afterwards I feel exhausted and nauseous and unco-ordinated and like I have a serious hangover for hours, sometimes the next day too. I’ve never been able to identify a consistent trigger – I think when my brain is in what I call “mig mood”, the auras will be triggered by anything or nothing, and when it’s not – sometimes as I say for months – it has no problem with red wine, coffee, bacon, bright lights, temperature changes, stress, whatever…
So thanks for the advice on tapping, and the cold pack treatment. I shall definitely try it. Two other things I found via another blog:
1. A German doctor has been doing promising research on the involvement – for some people – of the “frown” muscles around the eyebrow and hollow between the bridge of the nose and the eye, triggering an interaction with the trigeminal nerve and so neurological effects. This means botox has helped some people, though I wouldn’t like that! Less radically, teaching yourself to keep these as relaxed as possible may well help prevent “classic” migraine (i.e. migraine with aura and/or pain). If you feel that “frown muscle” going extra tense because of stress, eye-straining or bright lights, try to relax it.
2. A Harvard expert has found that if people intensively massage the spot just in the hollow right in front of the centre of their ears where a slight pulse can be fely – massaging hard, using two fingers, AS SOON AS as the aura starts, and keep on doing it for the duration of the aura, then they can very often prevent the pain part of the migraine. I wondered if it might shorten the aura…Today I thought an aura was starting – I was already starting not to see parts of words on the computer screen – I tried the massage immediately and hard, and the aura didn’t develop! But maybe it wouldn’t have developed anyway, it’s hard to tell!
So good luck to you all, and I shall try the cold press and tapping next time…
.
.
I have done quite a few experiments with migraine, and have had some interesting results. At present my best suggestion is the hot water held in the mouth, this dilates the blood vessels in the head and increases blood flow to the brain and the visual centers. In the probaway search box type in migraine and get more experiments I have done.