June 2000
Curing the Incurable Migraine
by Lynn Lawson
For forty years I suffered from what I thought was an incurable disease: migraines. Now I know that migraines are neither incurable nor a disease. It is a symptom. Once I realized that, I was on the right track toward a cure. And once I had followed my internist’s recommendation to see an environmental specialist, I discovered the environmental causes of the headaches that had finally made me desperate.
Though I had occasionally had a so-called classical migraine (one with visual disturbances) before this forty-year period, my so-called common migraines began when I was first exposed to urban pollution in 1946. From then on, my "common migraines" (a term found in much of the headache literature) increased in frequency and severity until I was having two or three a week — so severe that when I experienced one, I could not eat, sleep, read, watch television, talk, or think, only lie still with an ice bag on my forehead for entire days. I felt desperately sick all over, with nausea, shortness of breath, and weakness. Plunging my head into ice-cold water afforded momentary relief; otherwise nothing really helped.
For years a succession of doctors, including the founder of a well-known headache clinic, had prescribed a succession of drugs; none helped for very long, and some were dangerous. I bought buffered aspirin in bottles of 500 and took up to twelve a day, with only a slight blunting of the pain.
Once tested by the environmental specialist for foods and chemicals, I got better in two stages: first, by "cleaning up" my foods; second, by "cleaning up" my environment. When I tested myself for my chief food allergy by eating a bowl of corn meal covered with corn syrup, I had an excruciatingly severe headache for two days. That connection was unmistakable. Gradually, my husband and I got rid of almost all scented, petrochemically derived products in our house. We replaced our unvented gas kitchen stove with an electric one, and my husband "bakes" our daily paper in our electric dryer vented to the outside for forty minutes before I read it. I sleep on pure cotton, not a polyester/cotton blend, eat mostly organic produce, and avoid processed food. I take no drugs, except for an occasional prescription aspirin that contains no corn starch. We drive our car with an air purifier in it, with the ventilation system on "recirculate," and with the windows closed. I went to a detoxification clinic to sweat out some of the toxins in my body fat.
By doing these and many other things, I gradually got better. Being on a four-day rotation diet, strictly at first and now modified, helped a great deal. I can now eat in restaurants and go on trips, taking only a few precautions. My total body load of chemicals, I am sure, is down considerably. (These chemicals were acquired, not by an acute exposure, but simply by living in a polluted urban environment, by using common, everyday products in our home, and by working in a variety offices, some in what are now termed "sick buildings.") I feel good most of the time and get headaches only after unavoidable exposures (sometimes I forget what to avoid); I am 80 to 90 percent better than I was before I began this approach.
My relief, of course, is immense. And my need to tell others of my experience is equally immense. How many of the forty million (or more) sufferers might be helped by changes in their environment?
Lynn Lawson is the author of Staying Well in a Toxic World (Lynnword Press, July 1996) This article is excerpted from "The Myths of Migraine," by Lynn Lawson, Human Ecologist, Winter 1989.
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