it was great seeing you at Autcom, Amanda, loved seeing you there.

crabtail

I’m not avoiding drugs on the migraine front, but I’m very careful about them. Given that one class of migraine drugs seriously impairs my breathing (and are not in fact supposed to be prescribed to asthmatics), others (most) are just plain ineffective, and some do things like make my whole body retain water and puff up, or disinhibit me and make my emotions go out of whack, or cause massive allergic reactions, etc… I’m really careful.

I’m not going to try more than one thing at once — I’ve already made all the dietary and lifestyle changes that are necessary, and at this point I’m in the middle of trying one drug that has so far neither had any bad effects nor any good ones. If I were to start trying every migraine remedy at once, I wouldn’t know which one was working. So I’m doing the slow, obnoxious, and painful way, but also the way that’s more likely to get clear and definite results.

This also means, unless it’s an utter emergency I can’t take most painkillers of any kind, because all of them can cause migraines to get worse. So that translates to, actually, again, avoiding drugs — NSAIDs, Tylenol, and opiates can all make migraines worse in the long run. So can short-term migraine drugs. (The trouble is convincing doctors who are not up on the recent studies that, no, I can’t really safely take any of these more than a couple times a week. I just ranted to my headache doctor about this yesterday, and he assured me that, yes, there definitely are studies showing I should not be taking Tylenol every day no matter what my other doctor says.)

And I react badly to so many different drugs for so many different reasons that in general I am highly cautious about them. There are entire classes of drugs that I utterly refuse to take at all. Others I will only take in emergencies, and some only in the sort of emergencies where I’m going to have round-the-clock medical monitoring if I’m on them.

The fun thing is, of course, when I know more about a drug than some harried emergency-room doctor does. This past spring I was on a drug that causes edema all over the body, and he was trying to treat it as an allergic reaction. I finally had to pretty much pester him to give me a diuretic — which fixed everything — instead of sending me home with Benadryl, which would not have done a thing. (Of course, this is the same emergency room that ordered police — with guns — to come tell a friend of mine to leave under her own power because she was now “discharged”, when she had no use of her arms or legs at the time. That is a place where I now flat-out refuse to go alone.)

But… yeah. I do avoid most drugs, and the fact that I take a few (including a few herbal ones, not because they’re herbal but because for what I use them for they work better — herbal does not mean safer and I get really irritated when people assume it does) doesn’t mean I’m some big champion of the pharmaceutical industry.

Don’t blame you for avoiding drugs, I do the same whenever possible.

Kathy Grant

No, there’s nothing to it. Check out autismdiva.blogspot.com and her friends for more info. (For instance, her review of a scientific paper on the topic at http://autismdiva.blogspot.com/2006/07/autism-spectrum-prevalence-in-montreal.html .)