OW!! HEADACHES!

shaumom

My own personal advice?

To narrow things down, if you are having a headache at the same time every day, take a look at what else you are doing at the same time every day before then. Or if something else is happening at the same time every day around that time.

At the very least, it'll help you figure out if there is a food trigger, or an environmental trigger (visiting the same place where, say, there is an air freshener or some other possible chemical present), or a personal trigger (dealing with someone frustrating at the same tie daily) or even the exercise, if you exercise right before the headaches hit (exercise releases histamine as a natural process to elevate the heart rate, which for some folks can cause headaches). Or if something else seems to correlate.

Alyssa_Is_LosingIt wrote: »

And yes, the nocebo effect is real. People will indeed read some article about something completely benign and start believing that they have all sorts of adverse reactions to it because of something they read. Gluten and MSG are the big ones that come to mind, but there are junk science articles and blogs written about pretty much everything these days.

Just wanted to comment on the nocebo effect in general. In my experience, doctors attribute reactions to a 'nocebo' effect far too quickly, often with little data to back their views up. The medical community these days seems to fall into the pitfall of equating 'no research done on a subject' to 'research exists to disprove a subject.' Simply because something hasn't been studied, or a cause has not yet been found for a patient's described reaction to something, does not mean that it is not a real, physical issue.

And while gluten is a great example of the nocebo effect, it's also a great example of an overuse of it by doctors.

Some patients complained for years that they were having neurological problems, including difficulties with walking and movement, when they ate gluten. They were told it was all in their head - nocebo effect. And then recently a researcher in the UK discovered that some celiacs make different antibodies (TG6) that attack and damage the nervous system. Turns out we just never had the right tech to detect the reaction before.

Another gluten example: based on extrapolation from randomized testing, about 1% of the population has celiac disease. About 97% of those people are not diagnosed, based on doctor statistics. Which leaves a few million people who are not diagnosed as celiacs, but who would experience a significant improvement in health when they go gluten free. Considering that doctor ignorance about gluten and celiac disease is so high that many don't even know how to test properly for it, or what the symptoms actually are, it's not surprising that these patients are missed, but I would bet money that if these patients mention their health improvement, some of them are going to be considered experiencing a nocebo effect.

I'm not trying to argue that there is not a legitimate nocebo effect, because there's some very good evidence that it exists. But it seems to be used frequently by medical professionals when they run into a patient experience that doesn't match their preconceived ideas, and when nothing can be detected easily with a few tests. It has always made me very hesitant to attribute this to others, because none of us can know exactly what they are experiencing.