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The Migraine Brain: Your Breakthrough Guide to Fewer Headaches, Better Health
by Elaine McArdle, Carolyn Bernstein
"The biggest myth is that migraine is a type of headache. This is wrong. Migraine is a complex neurological disease that affects your central nervous system" (Bernstein 15).
I'm glad I grabbed Bernstein's book on migraines this time around. I've read others -- books that have advised me to try acupuncture or take magnesium, books that have suggested that I cut out bread products or get a massage every week. I have tried all I could afford of this advice. Some of it worked for a while. Some didn't. Bernstein's advice is different: more flexible, more applicable, encompassing more of the research on migraine while also empathizing with what it feels like to be in the middle of the pain.
From Bernstein, I learned that I don't need to find some puritanical way to blame myself for my migraines because there's a biological reason for them. Migraine is caused by abnormal brain chemistry (Bernstein 15). Good to know, right? And Bernstein doesn't leave us at abnormal and call it a day. She explains the chemistry, which I'm thankful for: "The latest research points to 'cortical spreading depression' as the physical reaction that begins a migraine attack . . . a dramatic wave of electrical 'excitation' that spreads across the surface of the brain, also called the cerebral cortex, when something antagonizes or upsets it" (Bernstein 41). Cortical Spreading Depression (CSD). It has an acronym and everything. I feel better about it already.
If I weren't using the same Goodreads rating scale I used earlier this year to measure Don Quixote, I would add more stars here, because Bernstein is a good teacher. She's kind. She's calming, and she has information that can help migraine sufferers get some kind of plan together to handle the pain. She speaks with equal enthusiasm to those who want to avoid taking medication and those ready to take anything necessary to stop a migraine. There are good reasons for both kinds of decisions, she assures. So yes, I recommend this book. It's a good one.
"There is probably no field in medicine so strewn with the debris of misdiagnosis and mistreatment, and of well-intentioned but wholly mistaken medical an surgical interventions." -Oliver Sacks, Migraine
I'm glad I grabbed Bernstein's book on migraines this time around. I've read others -- books that have advised me to try acupuncture or take magnesium, books that have suggested that I cut out bread products or get a massage every week. I have tried all I could afford of this advice. Some of it worked for a while. Some didn't. Bernstein's advice is different: more flexible, more applicable, encompassing more of the research on migraine while also empathizing with what it feels like to be in the middle of the pain.
From Bernstein, I learned that I don't need to find some puritanical way to blame myself for my migraines because there's a biological reason for them. Migraine is caused by abnormal brain chemistry (Bernstein 15). Good to know, right? And Bernstein doesn't leave us at abnormal and call it a day. She explains the chemistry, which I'm thankful for: "The latest research points to 'cortical spreading depression' as the physical reaction that begins a migraine attack . . . a dramatic wave of electrical 'excitation' that spreads across the surface of the brain, also called the cerebral cortex, when something antagonizes or upsets it" (Bernstein 41). Cortical Spreading Depression (CSD). It has an acronym and everything. I feel better about it already.
If I weren't using the same Goodreads rating scale I used earlier this year to measure Don Quixote, I would add more stars here, because Bernstein is a good teacher. She's kind. She's calming, and she has information that can help migraine sufferers get some kind of plan together to handle the pain. She speaks with equal enthusiasm to those who want to avoid taking medication and those ready to take anything necessary to stop a migraine. There are good reasons for both kinds of decisions, she assures. So yes, I recommend this book. It's a good one.
"There is probably no field in medicine so strewn with the debris of misdiagnosis and mistreatment, and of well-intentioned but wholly mistaken medical an surgical interventions." -Oliver Sacks, Migraine