The week of April 20 and so much you can do!
MIGRAINE, anytime, urgent: Contact your senators and urge them to sponsor S 660, the National Pain Care Policy Act of 2009, to improve “research, education, training, access, outreach and care” for all painful conditions, including migraine. It’s fast and easy to send an e-mail to your senators through the Alliance for Headache Disorders Advocacy. (more…)
Speaking of advocacy… to all of you who wrote to your representatives via Headache on the Hill efforts last month, here’s a big fat THANK YOU from Teri Robert, the Alliance for Headache Disorders Advocacy (AHDA) and me.
If you didn’t participate last month, you can always be an advocate for migraine and headache disorder research and understanding. You can send e-mails to your representatives at any time and ask them to help increase awareness and research funding for migraine disease and all headache disorders.
Let’s have some real cheese action with our w(h)ine!
Generic versions of Topamax® (topiramate, an anti-seizure med used by many people with migraine) should be available to you soon. Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. of Israel announced on March 27 that it had commenced shipment.
It’s reported that the March FDA approval covers 17 different manufacturers, and you can bet all will be rushing their generics to market. 
In 2008, sales of Topamax® amounted to approximately $2.4 billion in the U.S.
There have been studies and talk in the past and a bit more discussion recently about whether or not the B vitamins, any or which of them, might help reduce migraine attack numbers and intensity. It’s certainly something to research, think about and discuss with your health care pro.
Here’s a new article about a recent small Australian study involving migraine with aura, B6, B12, folic acid (B9) and genetics to add to your migraine information library.
I currently take extra B2 but had backed off from taking a strong B vitamin complex last year when I was taking so many supplements, having more migraine attacks, and not knowing what was helping or hurting. My neurologist confirmed that in some cases taking a B complex could actually cause more migraines. It’s important to discuss with your doctor any potential migraine approaches; even when they’re generally healthy vitamin supplements.
If you’re anything like me, it’s frustrating and difficult to be patient and take the time and care to test out supplements, medications, and lifestyle changes that might improve your health, but those investments can have invaluable returns.
It’s National Poetry Month — are you celebrating poetry? Writing some? Reading it?
If you’re a migraine poet, enter Teri Robert’s 2009 Putting Our Heads Together contest. The deadline is April 17.
Here’s my mind-poem from last evening’s beach walk:
urgently inhaling sun-sea-air energy
painting the scene on a memory canvas
with sounds and smells
for future reference
I wanted to publish a book of written and visual art, creative expressions of people who live with migraine, to help promote awareness and understanding of it. The book is done. Now I want to talk about it, feature some of the work, writers and artists, and provide a place for anyone with an interest in the book, migraine, other chronic pain issues, art, poetry, essays, photography, publishing, health and advocacy issues, and maybe even a sprinkling of current events and politics, to connect. Welcome to this migraine and life journey!
