Royals get migraines too! Can you imagine the stress and pressure of being Kate Middleton who is about to marry Prince William in the Royal event of the decade? The enormous amounts of planning, meetings, decisions, paparazzi, reporters, wardrobe choices can easily cause a migraine and history teaches us that the wealth and power of being a royal is not enough to make one immune to these incredibly painful headaches.
King Henry the eighth, Queen Elizabeth I and II, all suffered with migraines. Royalty is no more immune to these debilitating attacks, than are we commoners.
After having what promises to be, one of the most extravagant and fairytale weddings of all time, its hard to imagine a migraine causing the honeymoon night something less than fantasy perfect. Somehow, “not tonight, dear, I have a migraine” just doesn’t seem like an option.
Well there is some interesting research that Kate and all of you other women who may experience a migraine on a special night, should know about.
The often quoted saying “Not tonight dear, I have a headache”, implies that sex makes the pain worse.
Well, a Dr. James Couch, a professor of neurology at the Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, reports that several women patients have reported that sex actually helps decrease the pain of their migraines or makes them go away completely, in many cases.
So Couch asked 84 other female migraines if they ever had sex during a migraine? 2 out of 3 patients reported that they did and 61% reported that they experienced some sort of relief. This is pretty impressive since the prescription medicines known as triptans and sold as Immitrex or Zomig, achieve some benefit between 60-80% of the time.
What was even more intriguing was that more than 20% of the women reported that sex stopped their migraines completely!
Couch could only guess as to why sex had this favorable effect on some female migraine sufferers and also laughingly said, “I haven’t really figured out how to follow this information up with a more formal study.”
On the other side of things, professor Randolph Evan of the Baylor College of Medicine says that sex can trigger migraines in 10% of female migraine sufferers.
From the male perspective, 1% of men can actually develop a headaches that is known as “coital cephalalgia” (a fancy way of saying headaches induced by sex) but its uncommon and usually goes away.
But a much more common and real problem is the headache that can be caused by erectile dysfunction pills that men take, like Viagra and Cialis.
The bottom line is that sex may help certain migraine sufferers and it may cause migraines to occur in others.
Evans joking states, since migraines happen randomly and unexpectedly, using sex as a treatment certainly has its limitations, one just cannot grab someone in the office and tell them, “Hey, it’s a medical emergency.”
The real goal of chronic migraine sufferers should be to stop the migraines from occurring, not to spend a lifetime taking pain killers. This may sound like a dream but in fact, it is reality for hundreds of thousands of women. Women, who had tried everything to take back control of their lives, only to be disappointed. If you suffer from chronic migraines, go to www.migrelief.com. It will change your life forever.
Curt Hendrix
