Oh, My Aching Head

The human animal prides himself on using his head, but he pays a terrible penalty in headaches. Headaches are one of man's commonest and most persistent ailments. One of the worst forms--migraine --is a sick headache that recurs at regular intervals. Symptoms may include dark spots before the eyes, vomiting, lack of feeling in hands and legs. The trouble is, say the experts, people who least deserve migraine headaches are most apt to get them.

Last week at the A.M.A. convention in Chicago, Drs. Robert M. Marcussen and Harold G. Wolff of New York Hospital told what they had learned in an eight-year study of migraine. The most likely sufferers are reliable, conscientious, hardworking, ambitious people. They want everything just right, so they overload themselves with responsibilities and then get tense when they find that they can't finish the outsize jobs they have tackled. Their "pernicious emotional states" make the arteries in their heads swell, causing the excruciating pain of migraine.

The best treatment? The two doctors recommended injections of ergotamine tartrate as soon as the headache starts. If this fails, try codeine. Also helpful: rest in bed in a quiet, dark room; an ice bag; sympathy from physician, family and friends. For long-range treatment, the migraine sufferer should work and plan less, rest and exercise more. Dr. Wolff has another treatment for headaches of the migraine type: standing on the head.* The upside-down position, he believes, causes a "constriction reflex" that eases the swelling in the arteries.

Dr. Wolff offers an alibi, but no cure, to people with routine hangovers. The amount of alcohol consumed has little to do with the morning-after head pain, he says: it comes from fatigue and excitement. Heavy drinkers will applaud the Wolff theory: that whooping it up all night, without touching a drop, is enough to cause a hangover.

* In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, when reproved for standing on his head.

"In my youth," Father William replied to his son, "I feared it might injure the brain, But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none, Why, I do it again and again."

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