It’s not just a headache! A patient’s perspective on the advances in migraine treatment over the last 25 years - On Health

It’s not just a headache! A patient’s perspective on the advances in migraine treatment over the last 25 years - On Health

Victoria Hentschke

Victoria studied Molecular Biosciences at the University of Göttingen and Heidelberg. She joined Springer in 2013 and is now Journal Development Editor of open access journals in the field of clinical neurology.

It’s not just a headache! A patient’s perspective on the advances in migraine treatment over the last 25 years

Usually, The Journal of Headache and Pain invites researchers to write about advances in the migraine treatment and report on their research. For this year’s Migraine Awareness Week we wanted to hear the patient’s perspective on improvements in migraine treatment. In this Q&A Victoria Hentschke interviews a colleague who has suffered from migraine for 25 years.

Victoria Hentschke 5 Sep 2019

© kieferpix / Getty Images / iStock

You’ve had migraine for the last 25 years, what myths about migraine would you like to dispel?

“It’s just a headache”; “all migraines are the same”; “they only last a few minutes/hours”; I often hear comments like these. It is not just a headache and the symptoms vary from one person to another.

Here’s my way of describing it: with a headache and a migraine of the same intensity, the headache can be ignored because you can push it to the back of your mind. With a migraine, it paints itself over the front of your senses, and jumps up and down screaming.