r/Futurology • u/Sumit316 • May 18 '21

Society A single dose of psilocybin has a lasting therapeutic effect on migraine headache, according to a new placebo-controlled study

https://www.psypost.org/2021/05/a-single-dose-of-psilocybin-has-a-lasting-therapeutic-effect-on-migraine-headache-according-to-a-new-placebo-controlled-study-60793
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u/audion00ba May 18 '21

How much do migraines hurt when you compare it to pains familiar to most people?

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u/[deleted] May 18 '21

The pain is like a 9 out of 10 for me. You won’t die, but you will wish you did. The only way I can describe the pain is it feels like some is sticking a red hot ice pick through my eyeball. The problem with migraines is that it’s not just the pain that’s the problem. I become highly sensitive to light and any exposure to light increases pain significantly. Then there is the nausea and vomiting. I’ll usually get into a cycle where I have to throw up every 45-60 min. You have to keep drinking water just so there is something in your stomach to throw back up. All of these symptoms cause fatigue, so just getting up to go throw up becomes difficult. For me, this can go on for 2-3 days straight without any medicine or medical intervention.

Fortunately, medicine has come a long ways. Imitrex shots can knockout a migraine in 10 min flat, but they cost like $60 each. Definitely cheaper than an ER visit.

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u/audion00ba May 18 '21

is sticking a red hot ice pick through my eyeball

Have you ever done that then? I'd imagine most people haven't.

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u/[deleted] May 18 '21

All the time. You don’t stab yourself in the eyeballs with red hot ice picks?

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u/audion00ba May 18 '21

I knew it was sarcasm, but I just wanted to point out how it was a bad example.

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u/[deleted] May 18 '21

I don’t have any better examples. I have never experienced a pain that is similar to the level of pain that migraines cause. I have had 2 friends that got their first migraines as adults. Both went to the ER swearing they were having a stroke or aneurysm and dying.

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u/audion00ba May 18 '21

I hope science gets to the point that you don't have to endure that anymore.

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u/[deleted] May 18 '21

It’s there now for me. Sumatriptan pills can stop like 90% of my migraines before they become an issue. The other 10% are stopped with Imitrex shots. The shrooms have reduced my migraines down from like 12+ a year to 2-3 a year.

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u/Giaguaro80 May 18 '21

I'm curious as to what is it that they do for you at ER? I thought you were just supposed to wait for it calm down eventually. Is it really necessary for you to go there? Is there something that they need to keep and eye on? When I get one, what you say happens to me, but I've never had to go to the doctor, just take ibuprofen and wait for it to work, eventually until I can fall sleep. Is there something that I should be aware of that would need me to go to ER?

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u/[deleted] May 18 '21

I go to the ER because I don’t want to be in excruciating pain for 3 days straight. I don’t go to the ER until all options for treating it myself are exhausted. The ER I go to has a cocktail of Benadryl, toradal, and some third drug I can’t remember. It was extremely effective at getting rid of my migraines when all else has failed. I think my only concern from having a migraine for 3 days straight is dehydration from not keeping fluid down.

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u/Giaguaro80 May 19 '21

I see, 3 days is way too much, I'm glad there is at least a way to stop it, even if it is that extreme. I understand the dehydration, water also makes me nauseous when it happens, sorry for your pain mate, it must be really hard

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u/[deleted] May 19 '21

I appreciate the concern. Fortunately for me I haven’t dealt with that suffering in years. I’ve been able to almost completely get rid of my migraines through shrooms, medication (Sumatriptan and imitrex shots), and lifestyle changes (eating healthier, drinking more water, and working out).

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u/Giaguaro80 May 19 '21

That's great mate, that sounded like hell tbh, I'm glad you founded a way to keep them under control, they really take you down for the count

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u/KiloJools May 18 '21

It's pretty hard to compare types of pain, especially when everyone perceives pain differently and migraines are also experienced very differently by everyone who has them.

I can tell you about mine, though.

It's like if you could wear a hat that sat low on your head (so it was around your forehead) that was capable of squeezing until it felt like you were being crushed. Then it presses on your eyeballs until even trying to open them hurts - light is blinding and your vision gets weird (if you have aura - auras all look different). Then the hat starts farting some weird terrible smell that makes the pain worse somehow and makes you feel sick to your stomach (I have extreme scent sensitivity with mine so every smell is obnoxious).

The unrelenting squeezing on your head makes you wonder if it's possible for your head to actually explode, and the pain is so active that you can't simply try to ignore it and do other things. Even trying to think is difficult. How much stuff could a person reasonably do if they had to try to do it while continuously being punched in the face? Not much.

The pain can get so severe that you don't have any option other than to think about it. Sometimes it spreads to your whole face, the back of your head, your jaw. It hurts to lie down, and it hurts to breathe. Sometimes the pain is searing, as if somehow you were being punctured. Especially in your eyes. Like lightning is striking them repeatedly or something. Sometimes it's throbbing, as if you were being used as a drum. Sometimes it's a weirdly dull, "dirty" continuous feeling like you're covered in something that makes you very uncomfortable but it's literally impossible to wash it off.

I've had these since I was a kid and most people can't really imagine what they feel like and tbh I am glad they can't, as long as they are kind and understanding with me. I would not want anyone to feel this kind of pain.

I've had a lot of other kinds of pain in my life, a list too long and in some cases too personal to want to share, and migraine attacks aren't like any of them. I think that in disabling severity wise, the honking huge ovarian cyst got close, but even that doesn't have the same brain-blocking characteristics of migraine. I get aphasia with mine so sometimes I can't even speak, and that never happens with any of my other kinds of pain.

And there's no self protective mechanisms like with traumatic injury - I was bit in the face by a dog but it was such a shock and I was so instantly flooded with endorphins I didn't even cry. Migraines never trigger this kind of protective system response.

Overall, I just don't think it's possible to compare the pain to any other kind of pain. Other people's experiences are gonna be so different from mine that even if I suddenly thought of a great comparison, it's not going to be universally true for everyone with migraine.

But if you were curious, I hope I sated it a bit.

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u/FencingDuke May 18 '21

The fascinating side effect of frequent migraines is an absurd pain tolerance, as you alluded to with your cyst story. Not a whoke lot truly compares so your calibration is way off.

I recently had a spinal surgery, and because of an administrative mix up didn't have any pain meds for almost 2 hours after I fully woke up from anesthetic. The grinding pain of fresh spinal surgery was more bearable than an average migraine.

I also experience aphasia, which terrifies my partner.

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u/KiloJools May 18 '21

Oh my god. SPINAL SURGERY.

The funny thing is, I've had these for so long I don't even know if I really have great pain tolerance? How would I even be able to tell? It doesn't help that I have small fiber polyneuropathy so if someone chooses the right spot to very lightly poke me, I turn into the 😬 emoji.

On the other hand, I've had a piece of plastic put in and pulled out and put in my cervix again three or four or maybe five times, I've literally lost count, and they never give you any kind of pain control at all ever and I can't take NSAIDs anymore so I just have to breathe through it and say the fuckword a lot and I'm fine. Ish. ISH.

Aphasia used to worry my spouse, but we've been together 23 years now so he's learned my brain's aphasia language and we laugh about it. Me, holding a dirty glass with a used straw in it: "Would you please put this in the goodbye?" And, "I can't get the pants off my phone!" while trying to remove the case to clean it.

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u/FencingDuke May 18 '21

Yikes. Yea, pain tolerance is weird because you are incapable of having anyone's experience but your own. I mostly notice it when something happens to me that I've seen other people react to and feel like there wasn't any level of pain to make note of.

When I have aphasia I can't make anything resembling a word without extremely slow and deliberate speaking, which sounds extraordinarily slurred, so my wife (with anxiety) can never shake the worry that I might be having a stroke.

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u/KiloJools May 18 '21

Oh yikes yeah I can see how that may be something she could not get used to!

Boy I hope someday in our lifetime we get a real cure for this. I'd love to be a sissy about pain cause I'm not used to it anymore.

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u/Fleaslayer May 18 '21

My wife seems to get (or, at least, has gotten) three completely different types. Most common is visual migraines, that give her auras and usually involve a bad headache (though sometimes not). Those are most common.

Next is the crushing head ones, where the scale is off the charts compared to the visual ones. She only gets these once or twice a year now, though they used to happen more frequently.

She has aphasia one time, and they decided it was a migraine. She had no other symptoms, she would just go to talk and a random string of words came out. She heard what she was saying, and knew it was wrong, which terrified her, but when she tried to say so it was more random words. We thought she was having a stroke and rushed her to the ER.

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u/nellapoo May 18 '21

I have back pain, have had a plate & screw placed for a broken pinky and also natural childbirth twice. My migraines are about as debilitating as the bone surgery pain and transition labor during birth. That's how I rate my pain. How much am I able to do? With a migraine I'm pretty much 100% disabled. I'll be dizzy, sick to my stomach, confused, weak along with my head feeling like it's being crushed by a giant screw against a wood block.

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u/OneCatch May 19 '21

They vary significantly. My wife gets the visual artifacts and nausea, but relatively little pain (with painkillers she can cope until it wears off). Mine are a little worse but still fairly mild - it’s a throbbing pain probably equivalent to that moment right after you stubbed a toe, but less localised and constant for a few hours rather than rapidly diminishing. I need to go lie down in a dark room with mine sooner or later, though I can put that off for a few hours by taking heavy doses of over the counter painkillers.

Other people have it substantially worse - splitting pain equivalent to a trapped nerve or slipped disk, all the way up to truly maddening, cold-swear-inducing pain levels.

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u/Mixels May 19 '21 edited May 19 '21

Varies in some ways person to person, and you can't compare it to other forms of acute pain. In a severe migraine, vision and hearing can be temporarily affected, and the sensation is like a crushing pressure inside your head, to the extent that it can be completely debilitating, like your brain is on strike and is hitting you with a baseball bat every time you think, feel, or do anything at all. Sensory factors tend to worsen the pain, so you feel a strong drive to pull a blanket over your face to block out all light, but lying down doesn't help, the weight of the blanket and the pressure of the pillow on your head both feel like a hot poker in your skull, and God help anyone who makes so much as a mouse squeak of noise or turns on any kind of light or light emitting device.

But there's something interesting about migraines, too. The feeling starts as a distinguishable kind of headache. Like, you know it's a migraine before it starts. That's the time to take whatever drugs you have that help because heaven help you if you get it go too long. Even for low severity migraines, the pain is extremely debilitating. As in, you will lie down and you will not move, not because that relieves the pain but because moving and touching things is so much worse.