I had a headache reading "The Headache."
It's way too much history and detail, but I don't suffer from migraines and I rarely get any headaches, so I'm the wrong audience.

However, there's a big audience for this book: "Migraine is the 2nd leading cause of US and global disability, affecting more than 17 percent of Americans."

What's the book about?
Zeller writes: "What I offer you here is a sweeping and, I hope, accessible and (sometimes) entertaining look at the curious history and long-running scientific struggle to understand, diagnose, and treat headache disorders. For readers who live with them, I hope it is informative and affirming. If it’s someone you love who is unlucky, I hope the book opens new avenues of understanding."

It does open up avenues of understanding and compassion.

WHAT IS A MIGRAINE?
“Migraine is essentially a disorder of the way the brain regulates its sensory environment,” the neuroscientist Peter Goadsby told me. “The brain gets light, the same as you, but it overinterprets it. It hears a sound, like you do—the same sound—and overinterprets it."

"'I think the whole thing is about how the brain doesn’t handle—control—what’s coming in.' Not everyone agrees with Goadsby, but it’s indisputable that migraine pain is often (though not always) accompanied by other neurological disturbances that further implicate the nervous system—impaired vision, nausea, dizziness, sound and light sensitivity, and a host of other impacts. Some migraineurs even report losing cognitive function, like the ability to read, as part of their migraine choreography. And of course, there’s the characteristic pain: boring, typically one-sided, lasting for hours, and sometimes for days, driving many of the afflicted—overwhelmingly women, by a greater than three-to-one ratio among adults—to seek stillness, darkness, and solitude."

THERE'S HOPE
"The Nerivio, a “remote electrical neuromodulation” device, attaches to the upper arm, and purportedly works by stimulating nociceptive nerve fibers, delivering signals to pain-regulating parts of the brain stem. This, in turn, activates pain inhibitory responses that flow down descending nervous pathways, easing the pain of a migraine. The patient can control the device, which requires a prescription, with a smartphone. Does it work? A 2019 randomized,9 double-blinded, and placebo-controlled trial involving 252 migraine patients showed some reduction in pain in 66 percent of patients within two hours. About 37 percent reported being pain free within that same window."

CONCLUSION

A sign of a great book is that it engrossed and captivates a disinterested or semi-interested reader.
This book failed to do that.

However, if you what a comprehensive, supremely well-researched history of migraines and headaches, this is the perfect, 5-star book.

My thanks to NetGalley and Mariner Books for an advance copy of this book that is looks at a malady that effects the health and personal lives of so many people, one that people laugh about, one tha doctors put off as stress, a pain that can ruin days, lives, and affect the lives of others, and one that we are still trying to understand today.

My father used to get migraines, headaches that stopped the world cold. Not just for him, but for us. My father could only sit up and the only chair that seemed to help was in the living room. So my father would sit there, blinds pulled, a pillow over his head, and wait for the pain to go away. Many a time I would come home from school, open the door, and see him sitting there. Which meant no television, a cold dinner, and lots of reading. We didn't want to bother him, and in turn this made him feel worse. Noise hurt, smells hurt. Everything hurt. What hurt him worse he told me years later was hurting us. We couldn't have friends over, we couldn't cook, we couldn't play, we just went to our rooms and tried to be quiet. Dad did everything, acupuncture, acupressure, hypnosis, pills, caffeine pills with pain pills. Nothing ever worked and he suffered headaches for 45 of his 55 years. Reading this book gave me more of an insight to what he went through, and the misery that he and so many go through, including the author. And how much medical science still understands why. The Headache: The Science of a Most Confounding Affliction—and a Search for Relief by reporter and headache sufferer Tom Zeller Jr is both a memoir, a look at the science of headaches and a call to both arms, and a shout to others that they are not alone, and that they are not too blame for what they experience.

The book begins with a bike ride, a few mushrooms and an author in search of a solution. Zeller has suffered from cluster headaches for quite a while, and as a writer with some knowledge of science is surprised by how little the medical community knows or understands the debilitating pain that headaches can cause. Zeller looks at how many doctors view headaches as a woman's problem, with an interview with a woman who sufferers from headaches laying out all ther treatment and medical history to one doctor, just to be told well stress. Zeller travels to places where headache research is being conducted, looking at new ideas as well as old. From prehistoric trepanation, to digital MRI, and the use of new drugs, including psychedelics. Zeller discusses his own treatment, and interviews many sufferers, which give insight to those who have been lucky not to deal with this constant pain, as well as wonder why so many people are suffering, and what can be done.

Zeller does a really good job of both covering the science and the human factor. Many science books love to cover the ideas, without including the human factor. As a person with cluster headaches, that show no sigh of easing, Zeller can understand the cost, the pain, the personal feelings, and the fact that many in the medical community just shrug at their pain. Zeller has a very nice style, making everything easy to understand, with lots of empathy and understanding. One never feels lost in this tour of the brain and its aches and pain. I came away with a better understanding of what my father, and a few of my friends who also suffer from migraines feel like. Hopefully I can use this understanding to help them more.

A book that was so much more than I thought it would be. I was hoping to get an idea of why my father had headaches, this gave me that and a hope that maybe other people might be helped soon. As I wrote my Dad's headaches began at 10 and I know he was happy when both my brother and I never showed signs of having sharing his burden. After reading this I get why. A very helpful and rewarding book. I hope Tom Zeller finds something that helps his headaches.

The Headache is a book documenting the author's and other headache patients' struggle with headaches and their fight to get proper treatment. This book went through the history of the headache research and treatment. As someone who only gets infrequent tension headaches, I feel very lucky to not have the experiences delineated in this book. I cannot imagine what it is like to deal with cluster headaches or migraines. This book definitely help me to imagine that and was very well written. 4/5 stars.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with a free ARC of this book. All opinions expressed are my own.