Reviews

Migraine: Inside a World of Invisible Pain by Maria Konnikova

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juliana_caterin's review

hopeful informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

4.0

It's an excellent introduction to the topic and raises some interesting points to discuss. It isn't trying to solve anything but bringing awareness to the vast amount of things we still don't know about the topic and how bias impacts the reach and treatment.
It made me wonder: are women more likely to have migraine, or are they more likely to be diagnosed with migraine instead?
A short and entertaining audiobook. I'd recommend trying it.

acinthedc's review

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3.0

A short summary of the history of migraines and their medical treatment, including the lack of investment and research and gendered stigma. Konnikova notes that, like herself, most of the researchers she spoke to for this book either suffer from migraines or have someone close to them who does. While I found the book informative, I wanted more substance on the available science. Overall 3 out of 5

redhairedashreads's review

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4.0

Rating: 4 stars - It was really good

“I feel guilty about even thinking about attending to myself. You power through, not because you aren't in pain, but because it's the only option. Because you'll be met with a complete lack of understanding if you don't.”

While this is a very short delve into Migraines, it is very impactful and informative. Maria Konnikova dives into the history of migraines, current theories about causes, and why it is still barely understood. She does suffer from migraines herself and talks about her own personal experiences.

This book dives into the reasoning why people still don’t get treatment for headaches/migraines. Doctors rarely listen or care about people suffering from migraines, especially if it is a woman. Konnikova termed a new term for how doctors view migraine sufferers: Frueded. When a man seeks help for migraines history has shown that they will test for multiple things until they can pinpoint a potential trigger, but with women they are more likely to say its a panic attack or just hysteria.

I have suffered from migraines since I was a child. I usually spend about only 5 days a month without a headache or migraine. I have never sought treatment for it because of a lot of the issues that are discussed in this book. I was told when I first started experiencing headaches and migraines that I just needed to deal with it and nothing has changed almost 25 years later. I have taught myself to just deal with it and appreciate the few good days I have.

“It doesn’t matter what I eliminate from my diet. It doesn’t matter how I exercise or how I reduce my stress. It doesn’t matter how good I have got at self monitoring, seeing the earliest signs of headache and acting early rather than letting it get the better of me. I keep hearing the promise: Give it time, it gets better with age. But for me, for now, it hasn’t.“

I really appreciated Konnikova giving her own insights into her life with migraines in between the history. It is always reassuring to realize you are not the only one just dealing with this problem. Also I never realized you could have just a stomach migraine and I am glad I don’t suffer from them.

Overall, while this is only two hours long, I highly recommend it if you suffer from migraines or know someone who does. It was really informative and can help you understand what it means to suffer from migraines or headaches. But just remember, everyone’s symptoms are different and every migraine is different.

You can also find my reviews at Red-Haired Ash Reads.

brittanyae's review

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5.0

I feel guilty about even thinking about attending to myself. You power through, not because you aren't in pain, but because it's the only option. Because you'll be met with a complete lack of understanding if you don't.

I wish I could make so many people listen to this. It's only 2 hours long or so, but it paints such a vivid picture about what living with migraine is like. You very rarely are given the option to stop. Life goes on, with or without you, and so you push through most of the time, despite feeling like someone has your head in a vice, taking a drill or an ice pick or something equally traumatic to it. For hours. Days, usually. My longest recorded migraine is 53 hours, and that's still significantly shorter than so many people have to deal with.

53 hours, and I should count myself lucky.

Most of this review is just going to be quotes, I'm pretty sure, because this was so vastly, incredibly relatable. I was cooking the entire time I was listening to this and just nodding away, because it felt like I could've been telling my own story. Especially this bit about not being able to put the pain into words, despite that sort of being your thing:

I'm a writer. Words are what I do, and words often fail me when talking about what migraine--to me--feels like, what it is. "English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache," wrote Virginia Woolf in 1926 in her migraine-inspired essay 'On Being Ill'. "The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her. But let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor, and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready-made for him. He is forced to coin words himself." At least when words fail me, I'm in good company.

The world doesn't want to believe you when you try to describe it anyway, so there's hardly a point half the time. You're either exaggerating a normal headache or making it up to try to get out of something. The number of times I've tried to explain to people what a migraine attack feels like, only to get something like "Oh yeah, I get bad headaches sometimes too!" back is disheartening.

Nevermind the full-body shivers, the full-body pain and sensitivity, the fatigue, the nausea, the photo-, osmo-, and phonophobia, the vertigo, the lightheadedness or confusion, the auras - and so many more symptoms, because attacks are as diverse as the people who get them - all lasting for days. But yeah, sure, it's 'just a bad headache.' There's so little understanding of why migraine attacks happen, what causes them, how to stop them - because there's so little funding given to it, in no small part because a majority of sufferers are female and therefore often not taken seriously, accused of being hysterical. And because, as Konnikova notes that people will genuinely tell you, "It won't kill you."

No, it just feels like it might sometimes. Which we're just supposed to live with, apparently.

(... Reading this back, this review sounds very bitter. Which I suppose I am. Sorry about that.)