Posted by gary g on February 24, 1999 at 01:33:22:
Thought this deserved a separate thread
there was mention of headbanging - why do we do it ?
it provides a tiny respiyte from the burnig crushing pain
but there are better ways to do the same thing
it helps to think about what pain is
it is an interpretation by our brain of what's happening elsewhere in the body
this is communicated by the nervous sytem, very much like a electrical wiring circuit - sometimes running 1 way, sometimes it gets all screwed up and pulses back and forth
at any given instant, we can only process 1 bit of information (1 pain unit,let's say)
exactly the way this computer can only do one thing at a time - (it is an illusion that many things are happening at once - it is still a series of single tasks, just mixed together so fast it SEEMS like a variety all at once))
most pain medicines work by intefering with this transmission system OR by blocking the processing of the "pain unit" received by the brain
(medical technologists - I KNOW this is overly simple, but it serves for where I'm going)
OK - it is possible to mechanically do the same thing - give the wiring something else to do so it can't "feel" the pain (gee was that what Clinton was doing ? he musta gotten tired of "feeling our pain" I have a little handheld massage unit that will do exactly this if held to the headache area, very tightly, at least for brief periods - imagine those pain impulses coming in as discrete units, then find ways to substitute for them - sometimes this can be done with mental exercise also - count backwards out loud from 1000, listen to loud high-energy classical music and focus on being 1 beat ahead of the recording, anything at all to FORCE your brain to do something besides process the pain and to avoid getting into the unstructured frenzy/panic mode NO it won't stop the attack, and NO it doesn't work for more than very brief periods, but in those tiny breaks we CAN "reset" our tolerance, even just a little bit, and it's a way to get through a bad attack my approach for the last several years has been to find every way I can, medical, physical, mental & spiritual to break the attacks into smaller pieces - which are much easier to deal with and JUST DON'T THINK ABOUT THE "BIG PICTURE" I treat the whole thing like a battle game, and divide and conquer is an ancient and time-honored startegy best of all, it works!!!!!!!! it's apt to be a VERY long war, so we gotta win all the battles we can
it doesn't stop the pain, but it interrupts it - which is a HUGE gain in dealing with pain - the fast buzzing vibration apparently so overloads the nerve system that there isn't capacity left over to "hurt"
the cluster will be over when it's over........
for me, agonizing over it just seems to make it worse