When you’re in the middle of a migraine attack, you want instant relief. And while medications are often the most effective way to stop migraine pain, there is still a place for other tricks and home remedies in your headache treatment plan.
“Home remedies are important, especially to avoid the overreliance on prescription therapies and even over-the-counter drugs like acetaminophen and ibuprofen,” Dr. Christina Graley, a neurologist specializing in headache medicine at Johns Hopkins Medicine, tells TODAY.com.
Using those medications too frequently or on too many days in a row puts you at risk for overuse headaches (also sometimes called “rebound” headaches), she explains.
In other cases, medications cause side effects, such as drowsiness, that make them challenging to take during a workday, for instance. Non-medication home remedies can provide relief, especially when drug treatments aren’t an appropriate option or for patients who are trying to “avoid drug therapy altogether,” Graley says.
Additionally, it can be helpful to add non-medication options while you’re working on implementing lifestyle changes that will help reduce migraine frequency in the long term, she says.
Generally, these tricks are used “as an adjunct to medication treatments to help get rid of a migraine when you have one,” Dr. Susan Broner, neurologist and director of the headache program at Weill Cornell Medicine, tells TODAY.com.
They can be helpful when you’re waiting for medication to kick in or early on in your migraine treatment journey when you’re still figuring out the most effective strategy for you.
“As an add-on, they can be really helpful,” Broner says. “And there’s actually science behind why they work.”
How migraine pain works:
“Migraine is an inherited neurological disorder,” Broner says, “and it’s a dysfunction of pain pathways within the brain.”
One part of the pain-related circuit affected during a migraine attack, the trigeminal nerve complex, has a “whole bunch of sensory…
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