Among the most puzzling of headaches are migraines. Migraine (the word is a corruption of the French demi-craine, meaning “half the head”) affects 15 percent of people but is three times more common in women than in men. Migraines are almost wholly a mystery. They are highly individual. Oliver Sacks in a book on migraines described nearly one hundred varieties of migraine. Some people feel surprisingly wonderful before migraines. The novelist George Eliot said she always felt “dangerously well” just before a migraine started. Others are indisposed for days and left feeling starkly suicidal.
