Jonnie,
The nasal cannula is useless for aborting cluster headaches. It can't deliver a sufficient volume of oxygen... but it will dry your nasal passages at a flow rate of 15 liters/minute...
You need a good non-rebreathing oxygen mask like the $27.50 O2PTIMASK™ kits DJ sells at the CH.com store in the yellow tab at the left of this screen... It has a 3-liter reservoir bag and they last... I have one that's 5 years old... it's still working just fine.
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The 3-liter reservoir bag lets you inhale a complete lung full of oxygen in a single rapid inhalation cycle as fast as possible with minimum resistance and no delays waiting for the reservoir bag to inflate.
I don't use the mouthpiece or face mask. Instead, I breathe straight from the green T-shaped manifold... Less inhalation resistance and dead space containing exhaled CO2.
You need an oxygen regulator capable of delivering a flow rate of at least 25 liters/minute to support hyperventilation... 40 liters/minute is even better.
Buy one now before the end of the year... Obamacare kicks in 1 Jan 2013. The increased cost of medical insurance due to Obamacare and the new medical device tax, also a part of Obamacare, is going to drive up the cost of oxygen regulators...
Hyperventilating with 100% oxygen is very safe and it results in much faster aborts than oxygen therapy at a flow rate of 15 liters/minute... like up to 3 to 4 times faster with better than 97% efficacy across all pain levels up to and including a Kip-9...
Once a cluster headache has hit Kip-10 all bets are off... At that point you're in for some heavy sledding and you'll just be along for the terrible ride unless you've got a bailout/escape abortive like an imitrex (sumatriptan succinate) injection or nasal spray...
The reason hyperventilation during oxygen therapy is so much more effective is you blow off CO2 faster than your body generates it through normal metabolism... You can't do this at normal respiration rates ~ a flow rate of 15 liters/minute.
If you're hyperventilating properly and long enough, 8 to 10 rapid deep breaths is usually sufficient, you'll start to experience the symptoms of paresthesia - a very slight tingling of the finger tips, lips, and back of the neck. You'll also experience a slight dizziness... This is normal and the best indication you've pushed your system into respiratory alkalosis for the fastest abort possible.
In other words, you've cast off enough CO2 to shift your arterial pH to the alkaline side of the 7.4 neutral point. This in turn stimulates a rapid vasoconstriction in and around the trigeminal ganglia faster than inhalation of 100% oxygen at normal respiration rates.
Paresthesia is very safe and the symptoms dissipate in a couple minutes breathing at normal respiration rates...
There's also little risk of passing out... even though you wish you could pass out when the beast is trying to push your eye out of its socket...
In seven years using this method of oxygen therapy at flow rates up to 60 liters/minute... I've never passed out...
In as much as you're presently stuck with a 15 liter/minute regulator, you'll need a procedure called
oxygen therapy with hyperventilation as opposed to
oxygen therapy at flow rates that support hyperventilation which requires oxygen flow rates of 25 to 40 liters/minute.
The basic procedure calls for taking 8 to 10 rapid and deep breaths of room air until you start feeling the symptoms of paresthesa, then take two to three full breaths of oxygen. Hold the last lung full of oxygen for at least 15 to 20 seconds... then repeat the entire sequence.
The breathing technique used when inhaling oxygen is important... Start by exhaling rapidly and forcefully from your mouth with jaw dropped like saying the word "Haw."
When it feels like your lungs are empty... they're not... at that point do an abdominal crunch like doing situps.. Hold the abdominal and chest squeeze until your exhaled breath makes a wheezing sound for a couple seconds... This will squeeze out another half to full liter of breath... This is called the end tidal flow and it's highest in CO2 concentration because it's been in the lungs the longest...
As soon as you've wheezed for a couple seconds, inhale rapidly and fully until your lungs are completely full then without any delay, use the exhale technique above.
This procedure is best done standing to give your diaphragm full range of motion... If your get too dizzy, lean against a wall.
In case you're wondering about my qualifications... I developed both procedures and breathing techniques in 2005... I spent the next two years researching the respiratory physiology behind these two methods of oxygen therapy... Along the way I met with some of the brightest minds in the field of neurology who specialized in treating cluster headache sufferers.
I also met with Navy flight surgeons, aviation physiologists, and life support engineers at NASA to confirm the safety of these procedures as well as repeated exposure to 100% oxygen.
In 2007, I was joined by two others, Royce Fishman and Michael Berger, in an effort to modify the procedures I'd developed in 2005 to work with an oxygen demand valve. Royce was working for Linde AG Healthcare and provided the demand valves.
When we'd perfected the demand valve procedure, we conducted a pilot study with seven cluster headache sufferers participating. They included 6 chronic CH'ers and 1 episodic CH'er, 6 men and 1 woman.
All participants consulted with their PCP or neurologist before participating. Each participant used either a demand valve or 0-60 liter/minute regulator and an O2PTIMASK™ for 8 weeks logging pain levels and abort times for every cluster headache. Both methods worked equally well.
All totaled, the seven pilot study participants logged 366 successful aborts out of 367 attempts with these two methods of oxygen therapy at flow rates that supported hyperventilation. The average abort time across all pain levels up to and including Kip-9 was 7 minutes.
The results of that pilot study are illustrated in the following graph:
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This was the first study of oxygen therapy to use oxygen flow rates greater than 15 liters/minute. It was also the first study to clearly illustrate the relationship between abort times and pain levels. In short, the higher the cluster headache pain level at start of therapy, the longer the abort time.
The three of us developed a patent application based on this pilot study titled
Method of demand valve oxygen therapy for rapid abort of cluster headache and submitted it to the USPTO in June of 2008. The patent was published in December 2009 and first issued in January 2011. It's been issued internationally in Europe and other non-EU countries as late as April of 2012. All without reclama.
You'll find the same graph above in the patent at the following link:
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Take care,
V/R, Batch
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