I suffer from the migraine-with-aura thing and it's always triggered by certain foods or additives such as (the list's getting longer!) Caffeine, whey, Monosodium Glutamate (E621), aspartame and now soya lecithin.
Some of those ingredients are becoming more and more common in many foodstuffs and are occasionally impossible to avoid. Most chocolate (Soya Lecithin) and nearly all flavoured crisps (Monosodium Glutamate) are now off my list but some such as chewing gum (aspartame) are tolerable in small amounts with long gaps (weeks) between consumption.
So one afternoon I was going to the football match with my GP and got talking about possible solutions and he asked me if I'd thought of Viagra. I asked why on earth this would be considered suitable for migraine but as he pointed out, sildenefil is a vaso-dilator and as it sounded like the cause of my migraines were my blood vessels constricting, this should be tried.
So he prescribed me a box which I collected in some embarrassment from the local Boots and kept them in easy reach.
A month or so later, I was driving to another football match when the jagged lines started to encroach on my vision. Fortunately, the ones I had were the generic Sildenefil so not in a box saying Viagra so my son was none the wiser when I pressed one out of the blister pack and took a 500mg tablet and sat back to see what would happen.
Well it worked pretty quickly. It normally takes the aura 20-35 mins to clear getting very bad around the 15 minute mark but my son wasn't insured to drive the car we were in so I would have to pull over and wait and risk us missing kick off. But we didn't have to as the intruding lines disappeared and the problem went away within ten minutes of ingesting the tablet!
Now I'm not going in to any detail about the obvious side effects but if you suffer from the migraine-with-aura thing, you might want to consider this as a possible solution.
Some of those ingredients are becoming more and more common in many foodstuffs and are occasionally impossible to avoid. Most chocolate (Soya Lecithin) and nearly all flavoured crisps (Monosodium Glutamate) are now off my list but some such as chewing gum (aspartame) are tolerable in small amounts with long gaps (weeks) between consumption.
So one afternoon I was going to the football match with my GP and got talking about possible solutions and he asked me if I'd thought of Viagra. I asked why on earth this would be considered suitable for migraine but as he pointed out, sildenefil is a vaso-dilator and as it sounded like the cause of my migraines were my blood vessels constricting, this should be tried.
So he prescribed me a box which I collected in some embarrassment from the local Boots and kept them in easy reach.
A month or so later, I was driving to another football match when the jagged lines started to encroach on my vision. Fortunately, the ones I had were the generic Sildenefil so not in a box saying Viagra so my son was none the wiser when I pressed one out of the blister pack and took a 500mg tablet and sat back to see what would happen.
Well it worked pretty quickly. It normally takes the aura 20-35 mins to clear getting very bad around the 15 minute mark but my son wasn't insured to drive the car we were in so I would have to pull over and wait and risk us missing kick off. But we didn't have to as the intruding lines disappeared and the problem went away within ten minutes of ingesting the tablet!
Now I'm not going in to any detail about the obvious side effects but if you suffer from the migraine-with-aura thing, you might want to consider this as a possible solution.
