December 22, 2025 • 15 mins
Perhaps 40% of the everyone in the world has headaches, but they’re remarkably under-studied and misunderstood. Tom Zeller Jr. is author of THE HEADACHE: The Science of a Most Confounding Affliction and a Search for Relief, a deeply reported journey into the world of headaches and an exploration of what it means to live with severe, unexplained, and recurrent head pain. Tom Zeller Jr. is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Undark, a nonprofit digital magazine exploring the intersection of science and society. Previously, he was a reporter and columnist at the New York Times, an editor at large for National Geographic and a Knight Science Journalism fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Get Connected with Nina del Rio, a weekly
conversation about fitness, health and happenings in our community on
one oh six point seven Light FM.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Good morning, and welcome to Get Connected. Headaches. Perhaps forty
percent of everyone in the world has them, but they
are remarkably understudied and misunderstood. Our guest is veteran science
journalist Tom Zeller Junior. For his first book, he has
written The Headache, The Science of a most Confounding Affliction
and a Search for Relief. Tom Zeller's Junior, thank you
(00:35):
for being on the show. Thanks for having me so
the impetus for this book is in part your own
history with cluster headaches, which are rare. They are painful.
It is perhaps impossible to accurately describe pain, which is
very personal, very subjective. But what are cluster headaches and
how do you describe them?
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Sure so, cluster headaches, as you said, are rare. They
tend to affect more men than women, unlike migrain to
sort of the complete opposite and probably a more familiar
headache disorder to most of your listeners. I describe the
pain of a cluster headache in terms of intensity is
being similar to having your hand on a hot burner
but not being able to take it off for about
an hour or two while the attack is happening. So
(01:16):
it's a very intense. It's unlike migrain. You can't sit still.
It's sort of a hopping pain, you know. I guess
your listeners probably could imagine like hitting their shin or something,
and that pain is like quite intense. But it doesn't
go away for a good hour or two, and then
it goes away, and then it comes back, and then
(01:38):
it goes away, and it comes back several times a
day for a couple of months out of the year,
and then evaporates all together and is gone.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
They also have this weird phenomena among headaches, I guess,
particular phenomena of arriving at certain times of day or year.
What does that suggest?
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Yeah, it definitely suggests it's not perfect. If it were
perfect that way, it would be predictable and we could
probab we manage it a lot better. But there is
some correlation with time of year and time of day,
which definitely suggests the circadian rhythm, which is governed by
a piece of our anatomy called the hypothalamus and there's
definitely some sort of rhythmicity to these things. Probably true
(02:18):
for migraine as well, but it doesn't present in quite
the same way, so it's harder to pin down. But
I think in both cases it begins with the central
nervous system and the brain.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
If cluster headaches happen most often with men, women are
more susceptible to migraines. Talk briefly about what migraines are
as well.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Migraines are probably a familiar term to a lot of
your listeners. I'm sure something like fifteen percent of the
population is affected by them, mostly women, by a ratio
of about three to one, and they come with a
lot of neurological and physiological symptoms. A precursors to migraine
(02:57):
headache pain can often involve fuzzy eyes, can involve sensitivity
to sights and sounds and smells, and then ending in
a cascade of grinding headpain that sends a patient into
a dark room for hours and sometimes even days at
a time. You know all of these clear indicators that
the central nervous system is involved, that there's a central
nervous system breakdown unfolding, and they tend to divide migrainers
(03:21):
up into either chronic or episodic migraine. So a chronic
suffer never, you know, is probably more than fifteen migraine
attacks per month. Episodic is fewer than that, but definitely
it's something that's constantly a part of a person's life,
and while they're experiencing it, they're almost entirely debilitated.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Again, nearly forty percent of everyone in the world suffers
from some sort of headache. We've talked about a cluster headaches,
which are the least common then migraine. The most common
would be tension headaches, but yet all of them remain
largely unstudied. We're going to talk about the reasons. The
first I would like to mention has to do with
migraines and women, because it's women. There's this whole built
(04:04):
in factor that's been going on for centuries that it's psychological.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
Yeah, yeah, there's no question that you know, and in
fact that affects all of us who have headaches. And
for decades, even into the twentieth century, it was thought that,
you know, women who had migraine headaches were it was
something that was psychosomatic. They were stressed too much, they
worried too much, so often they were told that they
weren't sleeping with their husbands enough. It was just runs
(04:30):
the gamut of the most ridiculous. And this is familiar,
I'm sure to any woman. I heard it from a
lot of migraine patients myself when researching the book, that
lots of disorders that are associated more strongly with women
tend to get this sort of reaction out of the
medical establishment. And so yes, that's part of the reason
I think that we don't fully understand these disorders, or
(04:53):
at least we're not as far along as we ought
to be, because they weren't taken seriously.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
At the other side of the equation, headache specialists, because
headache is so difficult to understand, they report a burnout
rate twice of that of adults working in all of
their fields. Can you talk about the specialists and the
challenges for them.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
Yeah, that statistic is real. The burnout rate is quite
high for people who study headaches, and in part you
can understand it because there's traditionally been very little you
could do for someone who is suffering from a first
order headache disorder like migraine. Or cluster headache. You would
have to the suite of medications that you could prescribe.
All of them were designed for other disorders. They weren't
(05:34):
designed to treat migraine or to treat cluster headache, but
they seem to maybe kind of sort of work. And
so you might be given an anti epleptic, or you
might be given a beta blocker, or you might be
given a steroid, and all of these things have really
nasty side effects that add their own sort of burden
to this. So, yeah, there was this sort of journey
(05:56):
that the headache sufferers had to go on, and that's
sort of the aspect of things that I think is
starting to shift.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Our guest is Tom Zeller Junior. He's author of The Headache,
The Science of a most Confounding Affliction, and a Search
for Relief. He is co founder and editor in chief
of Undark, a nonprofit digital magazine exploring the intersection of
science and society. Previously, he was a reporter and columnist
at The New York Times and editor at large for
National Geographic and a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the
(06:27):
Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT. You're listening to get connected
on one oh six point seven light FM Imina del Rio.
You also point out a statistic in the book that
the meantime for a correct diagnosis for a cluster headache
patient in the US is between six point six to
eight point nine years. In the meantime, while people are
(06:47):
trying to figure it out, they're dealing with lots of prescriptions.
You were dealing with lots of prescriptions. It was interesting
to me a sidebar, we worked in the Hippodrome at
the exact same time when we were working both in
the same building. I was at a radio station. You
were working for the Times. But this was a moment
when you were trying all kinds of prescriptions and combinations.
(07:10):
Can you talk about sort of the tactics you took
to figure it out?
Speaker 3 (07:15):
I mean, I think you know. In another part of
the book, I talk about polypharmacy, which is usually a
term that we used for geriatric populations because as people age,
they tend to start taking a lot more drugs. But
migrain and cluster patients are similarly multi medicated in ways
that are problematic under themselves, and they're doing a lot
(07:35):
of it. And because a lot of these prescription drugs
are only middling in their effects. We also tend to
sort of get into you know, we all get online
and try to talk to other patients about what they're
doing herbal medications, illegal medications. Psilocybin is a very common
drug that people explore. So at my worst, you know, yes,
I was popping all kinds of pills, some of them prescribed,
(07:57):
some of them not desperation. Probably at least at one
moment I took too many and had a very sort
of nasty reaction to that. But I also think that
it's not that unusual, as we sort of in desperation
work with imperfect medications that are given to us by doctors,
and then combine that with imperfect medications that we find
(08:20):
on herbal shelves, and combine that if some cases with
illegal substances. You can imagine the outcome.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Interestingly, the history of a headache suggests that people have
been trying to deal with it for so long. Notably,
Charles Darwin studied headaches. A common practice from his time,
as you mentioned, was sticking beans to the sides of
someone's head, but he also had an idea of treating
them with a spinning bed contraption. What does that kind
of get.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
To yes, Yeah, well so, yes, Charles Darwin did have
migraines himself, and he during his travels in South America,
an herbal treatment or a sort of traditional treatment was
to put the beans on this the head. It was
his grandfather, Erasthmus Darwin who had the idea that spinning
someone on a centrifuge, a makeshift centrifuge by and pushing
(09:11):
all the blood in or out of their head might
have some effect on headache. And that sort of touches
on a prevailing idea behind headache that's lasted many centuries,
which is that surely it has something to do with
the blood moving in and out of the head. We're
discovering that that may not be actually the case. That
(09:31):
sort of presumption may have also played a role in
preventing more sophisticated treatments from coming out.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
There's also this concept now, the concept that the migraine
doesn't come from the brain.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
Yeah, or does it? I mean, that's sort of the question.
And I talked to a lot of scientists who bitterly
disagree over whether or not the migraine, the choreography of migraine,
does it begin somewhere outside the central nervous system, and
then the brain and central nervous system is reacting to
that or is it start as the genesis of it
somewhere inside the brain, and then we have all these
(10:03):
sort of physiological effects that attached to it. And migraine
does have a lot of other really interesting and strange
physiological effects aside from the pain. I mean, a lot
of migraine sufferers have vision problems prior to the pain
coming on, a lot of them feeling or a lot
of them have sensory like hearing issues. A lot of
them experience balanced problems, or they stop having the ability
(10:26):
to read. So all of these things are incredibly fascinating
when you take them into isolation and clearly indicate to
me and to a lot of scientists that there's a
huge central nervous system and brain component to this that
we should be paying more attention.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
To as far as the short term thinking about treatment.
So you mentioned many in the book tripp Dans, CGRP blockers, botox.
We see advertised all the time histamines. They work for
some people, they don't work for others. They work today,
they might not work for the long term. Are there
some that seem to be more reliable, more affordable if
(11:04):
you had to line them up on a grid.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
You know, I would say that the new CGRP medications
are the most promising that I've seen in terms of
the number of people who tend to respond. Now, you know,
if you get a population big enough, the sort of
mean in terms of who's going to respond and who's
not tends to kind of gravitate towards that middle fifty
to fifty. But with the CGRPs, another fascinating aspect of
(11:30):
it is that people who do respond, there's a group
called super responders who really just see their lives completely transformed.
It's almost an awakening. A person who's been just debilitated
by migraines their entire lives overnight suddenly no longer have
any headache at all, and that's not really happened with
any medication before. So I would put that at the
top of the list. I would not describe it as affordable.
(11:53):
A lot of insurance companies even today are still battling
whether or not they should cover these things, and I
should mention that in a lot of cases it requires
an injection. So it's something that you know, it's serious medication.
There are oral versions of it that have hit the
market and are continuing to come out. So and if
you can't get insurance coverage for it, they're incredibly expensive.
(12:14):
I mean, because as any new medication would be. So
I would say those are the most promising, but also
the most pricey, and then down from there. I mean,
I don't think I would describe any other medication as
being particularly useful to a broad population base. It's sort
of person to person.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
There's also something about finding a medical person who works
for you. Your story includes going to people who were
kind of under the radar and you know not so
let's say they're a bit shady to treatments in Denmark
of the things that the average person is not going
to be able to sort of look into. And there's
the disagreement even in the headache scientific community. So where
(12:57):
should people go for help?
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Well, I think that you know, in most cases, even today,
your primary care physician is going to be that's going
to be the person that you come into contact with
first and probably only. And I say that because the
number of doctors who specialize in head medicine is incredibly small.
There are a few thousand, maybe in all of the US.
(13:23):
So I would say, you know, the best that a
patient can do is come armed with some literature, come
armed with some sense of like where the science actually is.
And there are a lot of resources online that will
sort of arm you in that way when you go
into that interaction. But it is true that like a
lot a lot of scientists avoid headache medicine. They don't
(13:44):
They don't want to get into it because it's it's
a tough not to crack, and their colleagues tell them
that it's a backwater and you don't want to waste
your time studying headaches.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
So after all this studying you've done of headaches, how
are your headaches today and how are you sort of
feeling about them? Just a concept overall?
Speaker 3 (14:03):
Yeah, you know, my headaches actually are pretty good. I
mean it's characteristic of cluster headaches, unlike migraines, go away
for many many months at a time, sometimes even years.
And as with migraines, clusters as you get older tend
to diminish a bit for a lot of patients. Surely
there's a hormonal and a metabolic component to that. But
(14:26):
as I become an older man, my headaches come less often,
so that's a good thing. The CGRP medications when I
have had the headaches come on, I think have helped.
I think they have helped me. They don't help everyone,
but I think they have helped me. So I feel
pretty good about where I am. I probably couldn't have
written the book if I hadn't gotten to this point
where they were under control. So yeah, I think things
(14:48):
are looking up, and I think that a lot of
headache patients can take comfort in the idea that things
are looking up for everyone in that way.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Our guest is Tom Zeller Junior. The book is The Headache,
The Signs of a most confounding affliction and a search
for relief. Thank you for being on to Get Connected.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
Thanks Nina, I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
This has been Get Connected with Nina del Rio on
one oh six point seven light Fm. The views and
opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect the views
of the station. If you missed any part of our
show or want to share it, visit our website for
downloads and podcasts at one oh six to seven lightfm
dot com. Thanks for listening.
Welcome to Get Connected with Nina del Rio, a weekly
conversation about fitness, health and happenings in our community on
one oh six point seven Light FM.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Good morning, and welcome to Get Connected. Headaches. Perhaps forty
percent of everyone in the world has them, but they
are remarkably understudied and misunderstood. Our guest is veteran science
journalist Tom Zeller Junior. For his first book, he has
written The Headache, The Science of a most Confounding Affliction
and a Search for Relief. Tom Zeller's Junior, thank you
(00:35):
for being on the show. Thanks for having me so
the impetus for this book is in part your own
history with cluster headaches, which are rare. They are painful.
It is perhaps impossible to accurately describe pain, which is
very personal, very subjective. But what are cluster headaches and
how do you describe them?
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Sure so, cluster headaches, as you said, are rare. They
tend to affect more men than women, unlike migrain to
sort of the complete opposite and probably a more familiar
headache disorder to most of your listeners. I describe the
pain of a cluster headache in terms of intensity is
being similar to having your hand on a hot burner
but not being able to take it off for about
an hour or two while the attack is happening. So
(01:16):
it's a very intense. It's unlike migrain. You can't sit still.
It's sort of a hopping pain, you know. I guess
your listeners probably could imagine like hitting their shin or something,
and that pain is like quite intense. But it doesn't
go away for a good hour or two, and then
it goes away, and then it comes back, and then
(01:38):
it goes away, and it comes back several times a
day for a couple of months out of the year,
and then evaporates all together and is gone.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
They also have this weird phenomena among headaches, I guess,
particular phenomena of arriving at certain times of day or year.
What does that suggest?
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Yeah, it definitely suggests it's not perfect. If it were
perfect that way, it would be predictable and we could
probab we manage it a lot better. But there is
some correlation with time of year and time of day,
which definitely suggests the circadian rhythm, which is governed by
a piece of our anatomy called the hypothalamus and there's
definitely some sort of rhythmicity to these things. Probably true
(02:18):
for migraine as well, but it doesn't present in quite
the same way, so it's harder to pin down. But
I think in both cases it begins with the central
nervous system and the brain.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
If cluster headaches happen most often with men, women are
more susceptible to migraines. Talk briefly about what migraines are
as well.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Migraines are probably a familiar term to a lot of
your listeners. I'm sure something like fifteen percent of the
population is affected by them, mostly women, by a ratio
of about three to one, and they come with a
lot of neurological and physiological symptoms. A precursors to migraine
(02:57):
headache pain can often involve fuzzy eyes, can involve sensitivity
to sights and sounds and smells, and then ending in
a cascade of grinding headpain that sends a patient into
a dark room for hours and sometimes even days at
a time. You know all of these clear indicators that
the central nervous system is involved, that there's a central
nervous system breakdown unfolding, and they tend to divide migrainers
(03:21):
up into either chronic or episodic migraine. So a chronic
suffer never, you know, is probably more than fifteen migraine
attacks per month. Episodic is fewer than that, but definitely
it's something that's constantly a part of a person's life,
and while they're experiencing it, they're almost entirely debilitated.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Again, nearly forty percent of everyone in the world suffers
from some sort of headache. We've talked about a cluster headaches,
which are the least common then migraine. The most common
would be tension headaches, but yet all of them remain
largely unstudied. We're going to talk about the reasons. The
first I would like to mention has to do with
migraines and women, because it's women. There's this whole built
(04:04):
in factor that's been going on for centuries that it's psychological.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
Yeah, yeah, there's no question that you know, and in
fact that affects all of us who have headaches. And
for decades, even into the twentieth century, it was thought that,
you know, women who had migraine headaches were it was
something that was psychosomatic. They were stressed too much, they
worried too much, so often they were told that they
weren't sleeping with their husbands enough. It was just runs
(04:30):
the gamut of the most ridiculous. And this is familiar,
I'm sure to any woman. I heard it from a
lot of migraine patients myself when researching the book, that
lots of disorders that are associated more strongly with women
tend to get this sort of reaction out of the
medical establishment. And so yes, that's part of the reason
I think that we don't fully understand these disorders, or
(04:53):
at least we're not as far along as we ought
to be, because they weren't taken seriously.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
At the other side of the equation, headache specialists, because
headache is so difficult to understand, they report a burnout
rate twice of that of adults working in all of
their fields. Can you talk about the specialists and the
challenges for them.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
Yeah, that statistic is real. The burnout rate is quite
high for people who study headaches, and in part you
can understand it because there's traditionally been very little you
could do for someone who is suffering from a first
order headache disorder like migraine. Or cluster headache. You would
have to the suite of medications that you could prescribe.
All of them were designed for other disorders. They weren't
(05:34):
designed to treat migraine or to treat cluster headache, but
they seem to maybe kind of sort of work. And
so you might be given an anti epleptic, or you
might be given a beta blocker, or you might be
given a steroid, and all of these things have really
nasty side effects that add their own sort of burden
to this. So, yeah, there was this sort of journey
(05:56):
that the headache sufferers had to go on, and that's
sort of the aspect of things that I think is
starting to shift.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Our guest is Tom Zeller Junior. He's author of The Headache,
The Science of a most Confounding Affliction, and a Search
for Relief. He is co founder and editor in chief
of Undark, a nonprofit digital magazine exploring the intersection of
science and society. Previously, he was a reporter and columnist
at The New York Times and editor at large for
National Geographic and a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the
(06:27):
Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT. You're listening to get connected
on one oh six point seven light FM Imina del Rio.
You also point out a statistic in the book that
the meantime for a correct diagnosis for a cluster headache
patient in the US is between six point six to
eight point nine years. In the meantime, while people are
(06:47):
trying to figure it out, they're dealing with lots of prescriptions.
You were dealing with lots of prescriptions. It was interesting
to me a sidebar, we worked in the Hippodrome at
the exact same time when we were working both in
the same building. I was at a radio station. You
were working for the Times. But this was a moment
when you were trying all kinds of prescriptions and combinations.
(07:10):
Can you talk about sort of the tactics you took
to figure it out?
Speaker 3 (07:15):
I mean, I think you know. In another part of
the book, I talk about polypharmacy, which is usually a
term that we used for geriatric populations because as people age,
they tend to start taking a lot more drugs. But
migrain and cluster patients are similarly multi medicated in ways
that are problematic under themselves, and they're doing a lot
(07:35):
of it. And because a lot of these prescription drugs
are only middling in their effects. We also tend to
sort of get into you know, we all get online
and try to talk to other patients about what they're
doing herbal medications, illegal medications. Psilocybin is a very common
drug that people explore. So at my worst, you know, yes,
I was popping all kinds of pills, some of them prescribed,
(07:57):
some of them not desperation. Probably at least at one
moment I took too many and had a very sort
of nasty reaction to that. But I also think that
it's not that unusual, as we sort of in desperation
work with imperfect medications that are given to us by doctors,
and then combine that with imperfect medications that we find
(08:20):
on herbal shelves, and combine that if some cases with
illegal substances. You can imagine the outcome.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Interestingly, the history of a headache suggests that people have
been trying to deal with it for so long. Notably,
Charles Darwin studied headaches. A common practice from his time,
as you mentioned, was sticking beans to the sides of
someone's head, but he also had an idea of treating
them with a spinning bed contraption. What does that kind
of get.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
To yes, Yeah, well so, yes, Charles Darwin did have
migraines himself, and he during his travels in South America,
an herbal treatment or a sort of traditional treatment was
to put the beans on this the head. It was
his grandfather, Erasthmus Darwin who had the idea that spinning
someone on a centrifuge, a makeshift centrifuge by and pushing
(09:11):
all the blood in or out of their head might
have some effect on headache. And that sort of touches
on a prevailing idea behind headache that's lasted many centuries,
which is that surely it has something to do with
the blood moving in and out of the head. We're
discovering that that may not be actually the case. That
(09:31):
sort of presumption may have also played a role in
preventing more sophisticated treatments from coming out.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
There's also this concept now, the concept that the migraine
doesn't come from the brain.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
Yeah, or does it? I mean, that's sort of the question.
And I talked to a lot of scientists who bitterly
disagree over whether or not the migraine, the choreography of migraine,
does it begin somewhere outside the central nervous system, and
then the brain and central nervous system is reacting to
that or is it start as the genesis of it
somewhere inside the brain, and then we have all these
(10:03):
sort of physiological effects that attached to it. And migraine
does have a lot of other really interesting and strange
physiological effects aside from the pain. I mean, a lot
of migraine sufferers have vision problems prior to the pain
coming on, a lot of them feeling or a lot
of them have sensory like hearing issues. A lot of
them experience balanced problems, or they stop having the ability
(10:26):
to read. So all of these things are incredibly fascinating
when you take them into isolation and clearly indicate to
me and to a lot of scientists that there's a
huge central nervous system and brain component to this that
we should be paying more attention.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
To as far as the short term thinking about treatment.
So you mentioned many in the book tripp Dans, CGRP blockers, botox.
We see advertised all the time histamines. They work for
some people, they don't work for others. They work today,
they might not work for the long term. Are there
some that seem to be more reliable, more affordable if
(11:04):
you had to line them up on a grid.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
You know, I would say that the new CGRP medications
are the most promising that I've seen in terms of
the number of people who tend to respond. Now, you know,
if you get a population big enough, the sort of
mean in terms of who's going to respond and who's
not tends to kind of gravitate towards that middle fifty
to fifty. But with the CGRPs, another fascinating aspect of
(11:30):
it is that people who do respond, there's a group
called super responders who really just see their lives completely transformed.
It's almost an awakening. A person who's been just debilitated
by migraines their entire lives overnight suddenly no longer have
any headache at all, and that's not really happened with
any medication before. So I would put that at the
top of the list. I would not describe it as affordable.
(11:53):
A lot of insurance companies even today are still battling
whether or not they should cover these things, and I
should mention that in a lot of cases it requires
an injection. So it's something that you know, it's serious medication.
There are oral versions of it that have hit the
market and are continuing to come out. So and if
you can't get insurance coverage for it, they're incredibly expensive.
(12:14):
I mean, because as any new medication would be. So
I would say those are the most promising, but also
the most pricey, and then down from there. I mean,
I don't think I would describe any other medication as
being particularly useful to a broad population base. It's sort
of person to person.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
There's also something about finding a medical person who works
for you. Your story includes going to people who were
kind of under the radar and you know not so
let's say they're a bit shady to treatments in Denmark
of the things that the average person is not going
to be able to sort of look into. And there's
the disagreement even in the headache scientific community. So where
(12:57):
should people go for help?
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Well, I think that you know, in most cases, even today,
your primary care physician is going to be that's going
to be the person that you come into contact with
first and probably only. And I say that because the
number of doctors who specialize in head medicine is incredibly small.
There are a few thousand, maybe in all of the US.
(13:23):
So I would say, you know, the best that a
patient can do is come armed with some literature, come
armed with some sense of like where the science actually is.
And there are a lot of resources online that will
sort of arm you in that way when you go
into that interaction. But it is true that like a
lot a lot of scientists avoid headache medicine. They don't
(13:44):
They don't want to get into it because it's it's
a tough not to crack, and their colleagues tell them
that it's a backwater and you don't want to waste
your time studying headaches.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
So after all this studying you've done of headaches, how
are your headaches today and how are you sort of
feeling about them? Just a concept overall?
Speaker 3 (14:03):
Yeah, you know, my headaches actually are pretty good. I
mean it's characteristic of cluster headaches, unlike migraines, go away
for many many months at a time, sometimes even years.
And as with migraines, clusters as you get older tend
to diminish a bit for a lot of patients. Surely
there's a hormonal and a metabolic component to that. But
(14:26):
as I become an older man, my headaches come less often,
so that's a good thing. The CGRP medications when I
have had the headaches come on, I think have helped.
I think they have helped me. They don't help everyone,
but I think they have helped me. So I feel
pretty good about where I am. I probably couldn't have
written the book if I hadn't gotten to this point
where they were under control. So yeah, I think things
(14:48):
are looking up, and I think that a lot of
headache patients can take comfort in the idea that things
are looking up for everyone in that way.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Our guest is Tom Zeller Junior. The book is The Headache,
The Signs of a most confounding affliction and a search
for relief. Thank you for being on to Get Connected.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
Thanks Nina, I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
This has been Get Connected with Nina del Rio on
one oh six point seven light Fm. The views and
opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect the views
of the station. If you missed any part of our
show or want to share it, visit our website for
downloads and podcasts at one oh six to seven lightfm
dot com. Thanks for listening.
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