Migraine Mythbusting

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Migraine: When Headaches Are The Tip Of The Neurological Iceberg

Yesterday, we asked you “What is a migraine?” and got the above-depicted, below-described spread of responses:

  • Just under 46% said “a headache, but above a certain level of severity”
  • Just under 23% said “a headache, but caused by a neurological disorder”
  • Just over 21% said “a neurological disorder that can cause headaches”
  • Just under 10% said “a headache, but with an attention-grabbing name”

So… What does the science say?

A migraine is a headache, but above a certain level of severity: True or False?

While that’s usually a very noticeable part of it… That’s only one part of it, and not a required diagnostic criterion. So, in terms of defining what a migraine is, False.

Indeed, migraine may occur without any headache, let alone a severe one, for example: Abdominal Migraine—though this is much less well-researched than the more common with-headache varieties.

Here are the defining characteristics of a migraine, with the handy mnemonic 5-4-3-2-1:

  • 5 or more attacks
  • 4 hours to 3 days in duration
  • 2 or more of the following:
    • Unilateral (affects only one side of the head)
    • Pulsating
    • Moderate or severe pain intensity
    • Worsened by or causing avoidance of routine physical activity
  • 1 or more of the following:
    • Nausea and/or vomiting
    • Sensitivity to both light and sound

Source: Cephalalgia | ICHD-II Classification: Parts 1–3: Primary, Secondary and Other

As one of our subscribers wrote:

❝I have chronic migraine, and it is NOT fun. It takes away from my enjoyment of family activities, time with friends, and even enjoying alone time. Anyone who says a migraine is just a bad headache has not had to deal with vertigo, nausea, loss of balance, photophobia, light sensitivity, or a host of other symptoms.❞

Migraine is a neurological disorder: True or False?

True! While the underlying causes aren’t known, what is known is that there are genetic and neurological factors at play.

❝Migraine is a recurrent, disabling neurological disorder. The World Health Organization ranks migraine as the most prevalent, disabling, long-term neurological condition when taking into account years lost due to disability.

Considerable progress has been made in elucidating the pathophysiological mechanisms of migraine, associated genetic factors that may influence susceptibility to the disease❞

Source: JHP | Mechanisms of migraine as a chronic evolutive condition

Migraine is just a headache with a more attention-grabbing name: True or False?

Clearly, False.

As we’ve already covered why above, we’ll just close today with a nod to an old joke amongst people with chronic illnesses in general:

“Are you just saying that because you want attention?”

“Yes… Medical attention!”

Want to learn more?

You can find a lot of resources at…

NIH | National Institute of Neurological Disorders & Stroke | Migraine

and…

The Migraine Trust ← helpfully, this one has a “Calm mode” to tone down the colorscheme of the website!

Particularly useful from the above site are its pages:

Take care!

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  • How anti-vaccine figures abuse data to trick you

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    The anti-vaccine movement is nearly as old as vaccines themselves. For as long as humans have sought to harness our immune system’s incredible ability to recognize and fight infectious invaders, critics and conspiracy theorists have opposed these efforts. 

    Anti-vaccine tactics have advanced since the early days of protesting “unnatural” smallpox inoculation, and the rampant abuse of scientific data may be the most effective strategy yet. 

    Here’s how vaccine opponents misuse data to deceive people, plus how you can avoid being manipulated.

    Misappropriating raw and unverified safety data

    Perhaps the oldest and most well-established anti-vaccine tactic is the abuse of data from the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration maintain VAERS as a tool for researchers to detect early warning signs of potential vaccine side effects. 

    Anyone can submit a VAERS report about any symptom experienced at any point after vaccination. That does not mean that these symptoms are vaccine side effects.

    VAERS was not designed to determine if a specific vaccine caused a specific adverse event. But for decades, vaccine opponents have misinterpreted, misrepresented, and manipulated VAERS data to convince people that vaccines are dangerous. 

    Anyone relying on VAERS to draw conclusions about vaccine safety is probably trying to trick you. It isn’t possible to determine from VAERS data alone if a vaccine caused a specific health condition.

    VAERS isn’t the only federal data that vaccine opponents abuse. Originally created for COVID-19 vaccines, V-safe is a vaccine safety monitoring system that allows users to report—via text message surveys—how they feel and any health issues they experience up to a year after vaccination. Anti-vaccine groups have misrepresented data in the system, which tracks all health experiences, whether or not they are vaccine-related.

    The U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) has also become a target of anti-vaccine misinformation. Vaccine opponents have falsely claimed that DMED data reveals massive spikes in strokes, heart attacks, HIV, cancer, and blood clots among military service members since the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. The spike was due to an updated policy that corrected underreporting in the previous years

    Misrepresenting legitimate studies

    A common tactic vaccine opponents use is misrepresenting data from legitimate sources such as national health databases and peer-reviewed studies. For example, COVID-19 vaccines have repeatedly been blamed for rising cancer and heart attack rates, based on data that predates the pandemic by decades. 

    A prime example of this strategy is a preliminary FDA study that detected a slight increase in stroke risk in older adults after a high-dose flu vaccine alone or in combination with the bivalent COVID-19 vaccine. The study found no “increased risk of stroke following administration of the COVID-19 bivalent vaccines.”

    Yet vaccine opponents used the study to falsely claim that COVID-19 vaccines were uniquely harmful, despite the data indicating that the increased risk was almost certainly driven by the high-dose flu vaccine. The final peer-reviewed study confirmed that there was no elevated stroke risk following COVID-19 vaccination. But the false narrative that COVID-19 vaccines cause strokes persists.

    Similarly, the largest COVID-19 vaccine safety study to date confirmed the extreme rarity of a few previously identified risks. For weeks, vaccine opponents overstated these rare risks and falsely claimed that the study proves that COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe. 

    Citing preprint and retracted studies

    When a study has been retracted, it is no longer considered a credible source. A study’s retraction doesn’t deter vaccine opponents from promoting it—it may even be an incentive because retracted papers can be held up as examples of the medical establishment censoring so-called “truthtellers.” For example, anti-vaccine groups still herald Andrew Wakefield nearly 15 years after his study falsely linking the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism was retracted for data fraud. 

    The COVID-19 pandemic brought the lasting impact of retracted studies into sharp focus. The rush to understand a novel disease that was infecting millions brought a wave of scientific publications, some more legitimate than others. 

    Over time, the weaker studies were reassessed and retracted, but their damage lingers. A 2023 study found that retracted and withdrawn COVID-19 studies were cited significantly more frequently than valid published COVID-19 studies in the same journals. 

    In one example, a widely cited abstract that found that ivermectin—an antiparasitic drug proven to not treat COVID-19—dramatically reduced mortality in COVID-19 patients exemplifies this phenomenon. The abstract, which was never peer reviewed, was retracted at the request of its authors, who felt the study’s evidence was weak and was being misrepresented. 

    Despite this, the study—along with the many other retracted ivermectin studies—remains a touchstone for proponents of the drug that has shown no effectiveness against COVID-19.

    In a more recent example, a group of COVID-19 vaccine opponents uploaded a paper to The Lancet’s preprint server, a repository for papers that have not yet been peer reviewed or published by the prestigious journal. The paper claimed to have analyzed 325 deaths after COVID-19 vaccination, finding COVID-19 vaccines were linked to 74 percent of the deaths. 

    The paper was promptly removed because its conclusions were unsupported, leading vaccine opponents to cry censorship. 

    Applying animal research to humans

    Animals are vital to medical research, allowing scientists to better understand diseases that affect humans and develop and screen potential treatments before they are tested in humans. Animal research is a starting point that should never be generalized to humans, but vaccine opponents do just that.

    Several animal studies are frequently cited to support the claim that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous during pregnancy. These studies found that pregnant rats had adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccines. The results are unsurprising given that they were injected with doses equal to or many times larger than the dose given to humans rather than a dose that is proportional to the animal’s size. 

    Similarly, a German study on rat heart cells found abnormalities after exposure to mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Vaccine opponents falsely insinuated that this study proves COVID-19 vaccines cause heart damage in humans and was so universally misrepresented that the study’s author felt compelled to dispute the claims. 

    The author noted that the study used vaccine doses significantly higher than those administered to humans and was conducted in cultured rat cells, a dramatically different environment than a functioning human heart. 

    How to avoid being misled

    The internet has empowered vaccine opponents to spread false information with an efficiency and expediency that was previously impossible. Anti-vaccine narratives have advanced rapidly due to the rampant exploitation of valid sources and the promotion of unvetted, non-credible sources. 

    You can avoid being tricked by using multiple trusted sources to verify claims that you encounter online. Some examples of credible sources are reputable public health entities like the CDC and World Health Organization, personal health care providers, and peer-reviewed research from experts in fields relevant to COVID-19 and the pandemic. 

    Read more about anti-vaccine tactics:

    This article first appeared on Public Good News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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  • Getting Things Done – by David Allen

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Our “to-do” lists are usually hopelessly tangled:

    To do thing x needs thing y doing first but that can only be done with information that I must get by doing thing z”, and so on.

    Suddenly that two-minute task is looking like half an hour, which is making our overall to-do list look gargantuan. Tackling tiny parts of tasks seems useless; tackling large tasks seems overwhelming. What a headache!

    Getting Things Done (“GTD”, to its friends) shows us how to gather all our to-dos, and then use the quickest ways to break down a task (in reality, often a mini-project) into its constituent parts and which things can be done next, and what order to do them in (or defer, or delegate, or ditch).

    In a nutshell: The GTD system aims to make all your tasks comprehensible and manageable, for stress-free productivity. No need to strategize everything every time; you have a system now, and always know where to begin.

    And by popular accounts, it delivers—many put this book in the “life-changing” category.

    Check out today’s book on Amazon!

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  • What Happens To Your Body When You Stop Drinking Alcohol

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Immediately after we stop drinking is rarely when we feel our best. But how long is it before we can expect to see benefits, instead of just suffering?

    Timeline

    After stopping drinking alcohol for…

    • Seconds: the liver starts making progress filtering out toxins and sugars; ethanol starts to leave the system
    • 1 hour: fatigue sets in as the body uses a lot of energy to metabolize and eliminate alcohol. However, sleep quality (if one goes to sleep now) is low because alcohol disrupts the brain patterns required for restful sleep
    • 6–12 hours: the immune system starts recovering from the suppression caused by alcohol
    • 24 hours: immune system is back to normal; withdrawal symptoms may occur in the case of heavy drinkers
    • 3–5 days: resting blood pressure begins to drop, as stress levels decrease (alcohol may seem anxiolytic, but it is actually anxiogenic; it just masks its own effect in this regard). Also, because of insulin responses improving, appetite reduces. The liver, once it has finished dealing your last drinking session (if you used to drink all the time, it probably had a backlog to clear), can now begin to make repairs on itself.
    • 1 week: skin will start looking better, as antidiuretic hormone levels neutralize, leading to a healthier maintenance of hydration
    • 2 weeks: cognitive abilities improve as the brain begins to make progress in repairing itself. At the same time, kidneys start to heal.
    • 3–4 weeks: the liver begins to regenerate in earnest. You may wonder what took it so long given the liver’s famous regenerative abilities, but in this case, the liver was also the organ that took the most damage from drinking, so its regeneration gets off to a slow start (in contrast, if the liver had “merely” suffered physical trauma, such as being shot, stabbed, or eaten by eagles, it’d start regenerating vigorously as soon as the immediate wound-response had been tended to). Once it is able to pick up the pace though, overall health improves, as the liver can focus on breaking down other toxins.
    • 1–2 months: the heart is able to repair itself, and start to become stronger again (dependent on other lifestyle factors, of course).
    • 3 months and more: bodily repairs continue (for example, the damage to the liver is often so severe that it can take quite a bit longer to recover completely, and repairs in the brain are always slow, for reasons beyond the scope of this article). Looking at the big picture, at this point we also see other benefits, such as reduced cancer risks.

    In short… It’s never too soon to stop, but it’s also never too late, unless you are going to die in the next few days. So long as you’ll be in the land of the living for a few days yet, there’s time to enjoy the benefits of stopping.

    Most importantly: the timeline for the most important repairs is not as long as many people might think, and that itself can be very motivating.

    For more detail on much of the above, enjoy:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

    Want to learn more?

    You might also like to read:

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    The author, a clinical psychologist, discusses how mental healthcare has come a very long way, yet still has a long way to go. While advocating for top-down reforms, she does have a stopgap solution:

    Find ways to significantly improve people’s mental health in a single-session intervention.

    This seems like a tall order, but her method is based on good science, and also, most people will agree from experience that big changes can happen to someone in the space of moments, at pivotal turning points in life—they just have to be the right moments.

    Dr. Schleider recommends that therapists train in (and then offer) this method, but she does also give comprehensive advice for self-therapy of this kind too.

    These self-therapy directions, ways to induce those life-pivoting moments for the better, are perhaps the greatest value that the book gives us.

    Bottom line: if you’d like a lot of the benefits of therapy without getting therapy, this book can definitely point you in the right direction, in a manner that won’t be a drain on your time or your wallet.

    Click here to check out Little Treatments, Big Effects, and see what a difference you can make for yourself!

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  • Gluten: What’s The Truth?

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Gluten: What’s The Truth?

    We asked you for your health-related view of gluten, and got the above spread of results. To put it simply:

    Around 60% of voters voted for “Gluten is bad if you have an allergy/sensitivity; otherwise fine

    The rest of the votes were split fairly evenly between the other three options:

    • Gluten is bad for everyone and we should avoid it
    • Gluten is bad if (and only if) you have Celiac disease
    • Gluten is fine for all, and going gluten-free is a modern fad

    First, let’s define some terms so that we’re all on the same page:

    What is gluten?

    Gluten is a category of protein found in wheat, barley, rye, and triticale. As such, it’s not one single compound, but a little umbrella of similar compounds. However, for the sake of not making this article many times longer, we’re going to refer to “gluten” without further specification.

    What is Celiac disease?

    Celiac disease is an autoimmune disease. Like many autoimmune diseases, we don’t know for sure how/why it occurs, but a combination of genetic and environmental factors have been strongly implicated, with the latter putatively including overexposure to gluten.

    It affects about 1% of the world’s population, and people with Celiac disease will tend to respond adversely to gluten, notably by inflammation of the small intestine and destruction of enterocytes (the cells that line the wall of the small intestine). This in turn causes all sorts of other problems, beyond the scope of today’s main feature, but suffice it to say, it’s not pleasant.

    What is an allergy/intolerance/sensitivity?

    This may seem basic, but a lot of people conflate allergy/intolerance/sensitivity, so:

    • An allergy is when the body mistakes a harmless substance for something harmful, and responds inappropriately. This can be mild (e.g. allergic rhinitis, hayfever) or severe (e.g. peanut allergy), and as such, responses can vary from “sniffly nose” to “anaphylactic shock and death”.
      • In the case of a wheat allergy (for example), this is usually somewhere between the two, and can for example cause breathing problems after ingesting wheat or inhaling wheat flour.
    • An intolerance is when the body fails to correctly process something it should be able to process, and just ejects it half-processed instead.
      • A common and easily demonstrable example is lactose intolerance. There isn’t a well-defined analog for gluten, but gluten intolerance is nonetheless a well-reported thing.
    • A sensitivity is when none of the above apply, but the body nevertheless experiences unpleasant symptoms after exposure to a substance that should normally be safe.
      • In the case of gluten, this is referred to as non-Celiac gluten sensitivity

    A word on scientific objectivity: at 10almonds we try to report science as objectively as possible. Sometimes people have strong feelings on a topic, especially if it is polarizing.

    Sometimes people with a certain condition feel constantly disbelieved and mocked; sometimes people without a certain condition think others are imagining problems for themselves where there are none.

    We can’t diagnose anyone or validate either side of that, but what we can do is report the facts as objectively as science can lay them out.

    Gluten is fine for all, and going gluten-free is a modern fad: True or False?

    Definitely False, Celiac disease is a real autoimmune disease that cannot be faked, and allergies are also a real thing that people can have, and again can be validated in studies. Even intolerances have scientifically measurable symptoms and can be tested against nocebo.

    See for example:

    However! It may not be a modern fad, so much as a modern genuine increase in incidence.

    Widespread varieties of wheat today contain a lot more gluten than wheat of ages past, and many other molecular changes mean there are other compounds in modern grains that never even existed before.

    However, the health-related impact of these (novel proteins and carbohydrates) is currently still speculative, and we are not in the business of speculating, so we’ll leave that as a “this hasn’t been studied enough to comment yet but we recognize it could potentially be a thing” factor.

    Gluten is bad if (and only if) you have Celiac disease: True or False?

    Definitely False; allergies for example are well-evidenced as real; same facts as we discussed/linked just above.

    Gluten is bad for everyone and we should avoid it: True or False?

    False, tentatively and contingently.

    First, as established, there are people with clinically-evidenced Celiac disease, wheat allergy, or similar. Obviously, they should avoid triggering those diseases.

    What about the rest of us, and what about those who have non-Celiac gluten sensitivity?

    Clinical testing has found that of those reporting non-Celiac gluten sensitivity, nocebo-controlled studies validate that diagnosis in only a minority of cases.

    In the following study, for example, only 16% of those reporting symptoms showed them in the trials, and 40% of those also showed a nocebo response (i.e., like placebo, but a bad rather than good effect):

    Suspected Nonceliac Gluten Sensitivity Confirmed in Few Patients After Gluten Challenge in Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Trials

    This one, on the other hand, found that positive validations of diagnoses were found to be between 7% and 77%, depending on the trial, with an average of 30%:

    Re-challenge Studies in Non-celiac Gluten Sensitivity: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

    In other words: non-Celiac gluten sensitivity is a thing, and/but may be over-reported, and/but may be in some part exacerbated by psychosomatic effect.

    Note: psychosomatic effect does not mean “imagining it” or “all in your head”. Indeed, the “soma” part of the word “psychosomatic” has to do with its measurable effect on the rest of the body.

    For example, while pain can’t be easily objectively measured, other things, like inflammation, definitely can.

    As for everyone else? If you’re enjoying your wheat (or similar) products, it’s well-established that they should be wholegrain for the best health impact (fiber, a positive for your health, rather than white flour’s super-fast metabolites padding the liver and causing metabolic problems).

    Wheat itself may have other problems, for example FODMAPs, amylase trypsin inhibitors, and wheat germ agglutinins, but that’s “a wheat thing” rather than “a gluten thing”.

    That’s beyond the scope of today’s main feature, but you might want to check out today’s featured book!

    For a final scientific opinion on this last one, though, here’s what a respected academic journal of gastroenterology has to say:

    From coeliac disease to noncoeliac gluten sensitivity; should everyone be gluten-free?

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  • Jasmine McDonald’s Ballet Stretching Routine

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    Why Jasmine’s Video is Useful

    Jasmine McDonald is not only a professional ballerina, but is also a certified personal trainer, so when it comes to keeping her body strong and flexible, she’s a wealth of knowledge. Her video (below) is a great example of this.

    In case you’re interested in learning more, she currently (privately) tutors over 30 people on a day-to-day basis. You can contact her here!

    Other Stretches?

    If you think that Jasmine’s stretches may be out of your league, we recommend checking out our other articles on stretching, including:

    Otherwise, let loose on these dancer stretches and exercises:

    How did you find that video? If you’ve discovered any great videos yourself that you’d like to share with fellow 10almonds readers, then please do email them to us!

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