like ?
how the heck do we have iphones and AI but scientists still aren’t sure what causes migraines ?
Unfortunately this is true. There are so many other neurological diseases/injuries that have a significantly higher mortality rate than migraines.
Fortunately, in studying those, we also learn a lot about the brain in general (and thus things that might help migraines)!
My neurologist says no one technically has ever died from migraine or depression but suicide is much higher in people who have these conditions.
Not to mention women are 3x more likely to suffer from them than men. And medical history proves again and again primarily women problems aren’t important enough to prioritize.
Why give resources to “invisible” issues like migraines, when they can fund studying things like male pattern baldness instead? 🤷♀️ Hopefully things will change.
As someone with migraines and male baldness, I feel attacked by this comment 😅
Sorry, nothing personal—I actually like the bald look on a lot of guys. But if you had to choose baldness or migraines?
No worries, I meant it as a joke, and I would choose baldness every time.
Its weird but baldness was actually great for me, It made me want to compensate and start paying attention to other stuff like skincare, keeping the beard trimmed, my fitness levels(finally got in decent shape after a decade), etc etc.
So you could say im way better without hair haha
If it makes you feel better I'm a man with hemiplegic migraines and my dr doesn't care either, calls them headaches
Bingo
Also, migraines don’t prevent us (women) from bearing children. If it did they would have been on that shit real quick.
Endometreosis begs to differ.
Very true! This is not given the consideration it deserves. However: I think if it were even half as common as migraines—thus rendering hundreds of millions of women infertile—it would be considered a crisis
One in 8 or 10 women have it, hard to tell since most go “an average of ten years before diagnosis”.
I suffered for over 30 and only found out because I was finally deemed “old enough” to be allowed to have a hysterectomy at 38 years old.
So long as doctors keep telling women our pain and other symptoms are all in their heads we’ll go on being undiagnosed and dismissed, and the stats will continue to be underestimated.
😱 wow, I had no idea it was anywhere near that common. Fucking horrendous. I hope you’re doing bett a with that now.
I’m pretty sure you can die from a migraine, it’s just really rare. At least when I was diagnosed with hemiplegic migraines some research I found said to not try to push through it and so ghings like reading or screens or strenuous activity because it increases the chance of stroke.
Which is frustrating to hear.. I’ve had migraines for as long as I can remember, but recently had a new visual disturbance that I couldn’t see through, blocking half of my vision in one eye suddenly for 5 mins. Luckily I was in a store so this only caused me to bump the end aisles a bit.. not sure what would’ve happened if I was driving. NP/Optometrist weren’t concerned.. “ocular migraine”, which he said drink water and use Tylenol liquid gels. getting checked out soon by my ophthalmologist to check if it’s hydrocephalus related as my migraines are what lead me to finding out I had this years ago. So it’s sad to hear migraines aren’t taken as seriously as they should be.
Also why they're content to just say stop all migraine meds r pregnancy, because it's not going to kill you - even if it'll incapacitate you for 9 months (plus longer, if you have to stop before trying to concieve). Guess what I'm personally worries about right now?
On the hopeful side, I worried about this, but about the only time I did not get migraines was when I was pregnant.
This seems to be common, to not get migraines during pregnancy, but it's the months before pregnancy I'm worried about, since I'm taking meds that have to be tapered off before trying to concieve.
That’s such a stupid comment on his or her part. People do commit suicide but even besides that. What about job loss? If I can’t work, I can’t provide for myself. Men won’t die from a ED and look at all the money thrown at that.
I got a brain aneurysm after years of constant migraines. I survived by a miracle, so migraines CAN kind of kill you, tbh...
Because brains are more powerful than any known computer. They’re literally more difficult to study than computer chips.
Okay people please stop messaging me - I’m not a doctor, I can’t tell you if you have hemiplegic migraines, I don’t know everything about everything in the brain 😅 happy to answer any questions here if you’ve got them haha, but I delete 99% of the messages I get because they’re usually creeps.
raises hand if my neurologist was spooked by both of my sleep studies enough to do a 3rd one does this mean she might have hemiplegic migraines?
🤨🤣😉
Not sure if this is true, or if I remember this correctly, even. But think I read somewhere that even normal headaches aren't completely understood?
Correct. We know very little about headaches overall.
Can I ask you is it possible to have a migraine that runs from the temple, eye, jaw, and, and shoulder blade? With the most severe pain in the shoulder blade. They are one sided on the left, have been diagnosed as migraines, but no migraine meds help. Only opioids. I’m not asking for a diagnosis but does this even sound like a migraine at all?
I can’t answer that question but my hemiplegic migraines present with one sided discomfort, tingling, and numbness from shoulder to fingertips. It’s not connected to the migraines pain though, it’s a different sensation and is more numb and tingly than painful. I also almost always have mild aphasia when I get the arm stuff.
Very interesting and thank you for your insight! I sometimes get tingling and numbness in the shoulder too, but the pain is usually very severe nonetheless. Still experimenting with different medications to find a good fit. I just wonder if maybe it’s a musculoskeletal issues? 🤷♀️ Who knows. Most doctors I’ve seen are fairly dismissive.
I definitely think musculoskeletal issues can be connected, at least they are for me!
I have this issue and i receive RF nerve ablation treatment in my cervical spine for it and it helps prevent migraines and reduces my nerve and musculoskeletal pain.
Oh I definitely get that tingling and numbness. I’ve gotten nerve tests to test for neuropathy and it came back all clear. I also get the mild aphasia… Sounds like I’ve gotten these for years without realizing lol. Do people take anything special for them or do you just ride it out?
I just ride it out. After the first episode I went to my neurologist and they ordered an mri to check me out. Everything was fine.
That sounds like trigeminal pain. Has your neurologist considered this?
My neurologist told me that when you get a migraine you can have pain anywhere down to the base of your spine since the brain and spinal cord and all the nerve tracts are connected. Sometimes I have right arm pain when I have a migraine. Only time I have pain there. So yeah you can have pain anywhere from top of head to base of spine. So this includes your back and arms.
what makes the brain so difficult to study?
Trillions of cells. Trillions of connections. Billions of neurons. Thousands of cell types.
Not to mention, we can’t exactly mess around with testing and experimentation in living brains… and postmortem studies only tell us so much.
Also… the engineers who specialize in machines are not the same scientists who specialize in migraines. That’s like saying “why are scientists trying to send people to Mars instead of curing cancer”. A lack of people focusing solely on migraines is not the problem here.
And like cancer, there are multiple types of migraines with multiple complex combination of causes.
While we can understand come of the causes and find some treatments- we'll likely never have a "cure" for complex diseases like cancer and migraines.
If Jeff Bezos had chronic migraine, would he invest in personal phallic spaceships or would he fund research to advance the understanding of the human brain??
Do you genuinely think 1) pouring more money into the field is the only obstacle in finding a comprehensive treatment set/cure, and 2) if Bezos had chronic migraines he would’ve ever gotten to the level of money he has now?
- I think funding is a massive hurdle. In terms of funding for research involving just neurological disorders, I’ve read stats where migraine research receives 1/4 of what epilepsy research receives annually. As we know, the brain is less understood than most people realize, which is terrifying and sad at the same time.
- Do I think Bezos would have built Amazon as we know it if he had migraine from the beginning? Not at all. Do I think he could be where he is now if had chronic or more frequent migraine after Amazon was established and started gobbling up smaller companies? Absolutely. He has people design and build phallic rockets…. for over $5 billion. Which is basically 100 times the funding migraine research received in 2021.
Now obviously his Scrooge McDuck pools of money wouldn’t magically advance research but I do think it would make a huge difference.
Isn’t that what MRIs are for, like an fMRI or diffusion scan?
Sure, but we can’t exactly see much with that. Its view is very very limited.
This makes sense.
Also kinda hard to study people when they're having a migraine. Can't have the MRI staffed 24/7 for someone to call up and be like "hey I'm having a migraine now and I'd like to drive over and stuff myself in the noisy MRI tube!
ETA who the fuck would willingly subject themselves to that anyway
I would if it paid 😭🥲
Can confirm it is not fun being stuck in that noisy tube while having a migraine (luckily sounds don’t trigger me too much). I have to get brain MRIs yearly for something else and I’m curious, so I always look at the discs with my scans. I have kind of noticed more of those tiny white spots on certain images on days when my migraines were worse. But they mainly look the same at least as far as I could tell.
In addition to other things people have stated, imaging technology is relatively new. Like fMRIs became a thing in the 90s and things take time to become widespread and "affordable" and studies can just take time to do as well.
Well, the most effective way to examine the brain would also be highly destructive. Unless you think killing people is a good idea, you have to work with what you have.
Complexity scientists make a distinction between "simple" systems, "disorganized complex" systems, and "organized complex" systems.
A simple system is like billard balls. Few elements interacting in simple, linear ways. These kinds of systems are analytically tractable.
Disorganized complex systems are like ideal gasses. Many elements, but they don't really interact, so you can just coarse grain all the elements and work on averages. This systems are also analytically tractable.
Organized complex systems have lots of elements, that interact in non-trivial, non-linear ways. They cannot be readily coarse-grained and are not amenable to analytic analysis. They can only be studied in silico with models.
The brain is the most extreme example of an organized complex systems. Neuron-to-neuron interactions are highly non-trivial (involving synergistic integration of hundreds of upstream neurons), there are billions of neurons, and they all are constantly adapting, changing, rewiring themselves, etc.
In contrast, a computer chip is basically a simple complex system.
This is a fascinating breakdown and I've never seen it explained quite this way. Can you recommend any specific citations/resources that go into more detail on these? As someone who does a lot of simulation, I'm particularly interested in that 3rd category.
The original framework was by Warren Weaver - if you google his name + "organized complexity", you'll find the original paper.
This arxiv paper kind of goes into the details a bit. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.12482
Basically, the math of how many things a neuron is capable of means figuring out what a part of the human brain is actually capable of, could take until well past the heat-death of the universe
She already said it , but from an outsider I imagine sciencing the brain is dangerous when the subject is alive and difficult when they are dead.
Computers are just math equations and language built by humans. We aren’t as knowledgeable about all the functions and components of the human body on a micro level. There are many different pathways a cell can process to exhibit a function, and while there are tons of scientists working to figure out these processes now, it’s still very early in discovery.
The brain is the most complex structure in the known universe.
Same reason we have satellites and can go to space but women still die in childbirth. 🤷♀️
Upvote thissssss
I partially agree with this- however, men suffer from migraines too but men don’t die in childbirth.
Additionally, the brain is the most complex structure in the known universe. Rocket science is nothing compared to neuropathology.
I do think that if it were a more “principally male brain” issue there would be a lot more research out there. But still… I don’t have much hope for migraines ever being cured.
In society's defence, we did kill some people during missions. And the problem "how make thing go fast and up" is easier than the combination of medical and social issues that contribute to maternal mortality. Like there are multiple medical complications that can happen, sometimes very suddenly, that would all need to be better addressed in terms of both diagnosis and treatment. And that is almost secondary to the social issue that plagues the US, access to healthcare. In many rural areas (especially in the south) there is a shortage of providers that can supervise prenatal care and birth, and often patients in those regions have difficulty paying for treatment. These areas often have some of the highest maternal mortality rates. https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-maternal-mortality-rates/#:~:text=Mississippi%20had%20the%20highest%20maternal%20mortality%20rate%20in%202021%2C%20with,second%2Dlowest%20(17.4).
This is really not a good comparison at all
Migraine research hasn’t been around for that long 😖
"Migraine research hasn’t been around for that long"
But migraines have. Women are much more likely to have migraines than men. I wonder if it's connected.
Right! It’s strange that migraines were once thought to be something of a spiritual affliction, then a mental illness and migraineurs lived in sanitariums. I remember my grandma cussing out a doctor who told her that migraines aren’t real. 🤣 Like many of us I was told I had mental illness until the past 5 years bc of research. It’s wild that still today even with the incredible research in the past 10 years proving migraines are real, how to treat them and people still think it’s mental illness or stress.
I started getting migraines aged 5, and was flatly told by several doctors that I was wrong and it wasn’t possible for a child to get migraines because they’re “caused by stress” and what would a child have to be stressed about. Clearly I was overplaying the pain of a standard headache, or lying to get attention.
Damn that’s awful. I don’t forget the decades I was faking, mentally ill, drug seeker even though I would specifically say I don’t want opioids. It was only ~5 years ago I started to get treatment for migraines & the nerve disorders created by not being treated for migraines. It’s been fascinating how supremely there’s way more options even though most don’t work for me. I’m shocked that I actually am taken seriously.
Wow that is the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard. What about the millions of children being sexually abused by a family member? Tough to imagine anything more stressful.
Definitely connected. Migraines were probably filed under Hysteria.
MRIs have only existed for like 50 years and fMRIs have been around for like 30 so that is part of it
Sometimes I wonder if hormones are to blame yet they want to give us MORE hormones ( birth control ) to try and relieve them. It’s ridiculous. The only people I know that suffer from migraines are all women.
Different specialties. It's like asking why scientists are sending probes to outerspace when the environment here is dying. Different skill sets, different budgets, and different levels of promotional awareness
Also, different fields interact. Significant advancements in image analysis of MRI and CT scans came from astronomy, for example. And MRI only exists in the first place because physicists studied magnetic resonance in the 40’s.
If we want scientific advancements, we have to fund all science because we don’t know where the next breakthrough will come from.
Also medical advances have slowed in the past few decades because we have ethics boards and the FDA that studies have to be approved by. Back in the day you could just give developmentally disabled people hepatitis because "they were gonna get anyway" and "it's for the greater good" and developing a vaccine was a much quicker process. I mean, you could even watch black people die from a treatable disease that you didn't even tell them they have or could spread because you "wanted to see if it progressed differently in negro men then in white men" and people were generally chill with that.
Nowadays we get all bent out of shape about studying new drugs on people for things that already have a standard of care because we don't want to withhold effective treatment from people. AND you actually have to tell people what you are doing to them and provide them with information about risks. AND they have to be able to make a decision with informed consent or have a guardian consent. But if the patient is not able to consent for themselves then boy howdy will you be doing paperwork!
Not to mention all the experiments Nazis conducted at concentration camps.
And those done by the Japanese
Software engineer here:
A computer is dumb. At the nano level, a computer is a very simple piece of technology. Transistors (which is what a computer chip is made of), is just a switch that switches on and off. Now there are billions of these in just the CPU alone.
Data storage is the same thing. It either has 1 or 0 written to it.
The sweet juice of a computer is just coding. AI is also just code that is trained on data. There really isn't anything too special about AI. And most "AI" isn't actually AI.
A brain on the other hand. Has to handle hormones, different chemicals, it's not binary (1's and 0's), it's a much more complex piece of machinery.
We know many things that cause migraines, a better question is what makes some brains more vulnerable than others. The brain is more complicated than landing on the moon or AI which is just a computer program that entirely relies on human input.
There are people out there who have never even had a headache. From what I have read, only people who suffer from migraine disease can even get migraines.
Some people will get 1 or 2 in a lifetime, and some get them daily, but it seems that not every brain can get them unless there is some kind of injury causing a change.
That might not be accurate, but it does make sense to me. All our brains are so different and a migraine is a weird reaction. It definitely seems to run in families.
Yes but the genetics seem to be tricky so we still don't know the mechanisms that leave the brain vulnerable. Migraine Disease is a misnomer, migraines are a syndrome which is quite different. Migraines are mostly a symptom of something else, idiopathic migraines are probably genetic but we also don't know why as it likely involves many genes
because different scientists work on different things; the scientists working on AI and iphones are way different than the ones studying brains and health
Also progress in different scientific fields occurs at inherently different paces. Biological developments are slower across the board (not just for migraines) than developments in engineering and computer science simply due to the nature of the work and the types of experiments. Even with equal effort and funding, medical breakthroughs would still take longer.
That darn FDA and those bastards on the ethics review boards are so strict about "informed consent" and "minimizing risk of harm" and it really slows progress down. Like all this "bodily autonomy" bs really creates a shortage of cadavers and study participants.
😂.
Even so, I can teach someone to code much faster than I can teach someone to understand a huge codebase written by someone else in a new language.
The problem of ‘how the brain works’ is just so much more complex than creating a program that pretends to be clever. It is generally easier to create than to try and understand something you know nothing about without instructions.
Funding and lobbying. It’s also hard to get funding for basic research—-sometimes it seems like treating something is more important than the why for various funding agencies. It’s a weird push and pull when you try to decide what you want to research and how to research it.
ETA: also, like other people have said, brains are complicated and hard to study.
It's hard to get funding to study a non-fatal chronic illness that doesn't prohibit most/all suffers from working. Also the brain is complex and dissecting live people is an ethical no-no and at tissue sampling is unjustifiably risky so we have to rely on imaging if we want to understand active migraines. And imagining tech like the MRI/FMRI isn't THAT old and is expensive and potentially difficult to access for some researchers. Like MRIs were invented in the 70s and FMRIs in the 90s. In 30 years with imaging technology we have made a decent amount of progress. Determining cause takes time, plus there are normal variations in brains between people that don't have clinical significance so that adds additional complexity to brain studies.
But people do study it and there are theories about cause. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1474-4422(14)70193-0
Also you don't necessarily need to understand the underlying pathophysiology of a disease or even the mechanism of action of a drug to treat something. As long as you have evidence that it works and is safe you can get FDA approval. They prefer that you know how it works and make an effort to figure it out, but it's not a hard requirement for approval.
funding. there’s not a ton to go around and what does exist usually goes into what’s most profitable like pharmaceuticals or tech.
migraines are a complex disease that can happen to different people for different reasons (genetic, musculoskeletal, environmental, stress, combination, etc) and that’s in part why they’re difficult to treat. migraines are typically unique to each individual which complicates matters even more. there’s general trends sure but with how the medical system is set up it’s near impossible for patients to get the in-depth investigation they’d need to pinpoint specifics.
Our time will come.
Because we don’t yet have a billionaire with debilitating migraines willing to donate the money to fund it.
The human body's biology is more complex and mysterious than an iPhone.
Money. iPhones and AI make billions. Researching migraines takes a lot money with little profit. There are no vast cities filled with incredibly smart ambitious people working on migraines. They work for lucrative tech.
Maybe we should ask AI to figure out what causes migraines. /s Edited to add /s
AI is just trained on existing data, so in cases like migraine where the data is severely lacking it won't be helpful
Yea I know. I should have added /s for sarcasm.
Theres no money in curing migraines, only treating symptoms.
iphones and AI were created by humans, so we know exactly how they are supposed to work. We have a general understanding of the human brain, but I don't think we know everything. When an iphone isn't working correctly, we can open it and troubleshoot it while it's working. We can't really do that with a living human's head while a migrate is occurring. We have MRIs but they can only see certain things in the brain. In order to get a better understanding, we would probably need a way to monitor detailed brain activity when normal (for a baseline) and during a migraine.
Because there are far stronger ethical constraints on testing a human problem vs testing an electronic/technological problem. It means we can progress at a far faster rate when studying technology vs the human body because we don’t have to worry about what happens if we break something with a phone or AI
Honestly, I don’t think it was taken very seriously until recently because it’s a disorder that a lot of women have!
Hell, I wasn’t taken seriously by any of my male doctors, it wasn’t until I went to a younger female doctor in my mid-30s, after having migraines for almost 30 years, that I was given preventatives, abortives, and a referral to a neurologist for an MRI
I always felt like it’s because the majority of migraine sufferers are women and studying the female body has never been a priority.
Read splitting by Amanda Ellison if you haven’t already.
Also, it differs from person to person.
because migraine research doesn't pay (in monetary terms) but iphones and AI make bank. not to be like it's capitalism but...
Because brains are way more complex than cell phones
I’d like to volunteer my brain for science. Stick me in an fmri or whatever you need and record what is happening while I have a migraine. Hell, I’ll let you stick probes and electrodes in my brain. Anything that could get us closer to an answer.
I suspect that a large share of the funding for "migraine research" (like 99% of it, literally) all goes to developing new pharmaceuticals to treat it as opposed to actual root causes of it. I've reached out to several "migraine experts" to try and have a conversation with them regarding potential sources and have offered scrutiny of my dietary notes and reactions (a couple of years worth) and it seems none of them want to ever discuss that. It's all "there's a new drug in testing now that you only need to take once per blah blah blah and it works better than blah blah blah and has similar side effects to all the previous drugs combined"
Until that changes - and I don't see that big of a paradigm shift in our society - I think we'll continue to be in the dark about actual causes of migraine and just be continually spoonfed the newest, greatest "treatment". Big Pharma controls soooooo much in our society. They make so much money off people taking pills; there's literally no reason for any big pharmaceutical company to ever fund research dedicated to solving migraines at their root cause.
This is exactly it. My best friend has an often fatal non-curable genetic disease that has a foundation that raises money and does all the hoopla. She had a doctor that realized non of the many many meds were targeting the actual problem. Every med covered a different symptom instead. Even the “magic cure” ones. He opened his own research facility and started researching the actual genes. He got all his own funding. The foundation caught wind of it, and gave the hospital an ultimatum. They could fire the doctor, or they would pull their funding. The doctor was fired. He lost a lot of backers. All because the foundation wants to keep making money. Big pharma is a big backer of the foundation. They don’t want research into how to fix it, because then people won’t buy hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to them.
Exactly. Except it's more like millions of dollars per year.
It is pure fucking evil.
I don't think anybody is really looking into what causes migraines or a way to fix whatever it is that does. Migraines are rarely fatal the side effects are manageable.
I think most doctors and researchers look at it as it's not a disease it's just something you have ,"take some aspirin and get over it."
My migraines are cervicogenic migraines, so the cause stems from issues with my neck.
Some people have an obvious outright cause like medications, head trauma, environmental sensitivities, co-existing medical conditions but others don’t.
Me too! Bad posture and cervical dystonia give me migraine issues. Even knowing my cause for migraines the doctors are like "yeah we don't know why you have those problems that are causing this, not enough research, it's just who you are and there's no cure". Wish they'd figure it out
Priorities. /s
The human body is more complicated than technology.
Partially misogyny, because most migraine sufferers are women — and our pain often gets dismissed as “being dramatic” — and partially because the brain really is that complicated.
I don’t think we’d have solved migraines by now in a world without misogyny, but I do think we’d be closer.
They do know. Migraines are caused by constricting and dilating blood vessels in our brain. Depending on your symptoms you can see where it’s happening. If you lose sight, your migraine is in your occipital lobe. However there are migraines caused by tumours and underlying diseases. But benign migraines are caused bc of blood vessels basically. That’s why beta blockers are often prescribed
I'm pretty sure a lot of genetic mutations involving ion channels can cause migraines, even if they're not the only thing that can
Because it’s literally a paradox, the headache paradox. We shouldn’t be able to feel pain in our head, but we do. It’s so simple yet so complex I don’t believe this answer will be found until we get much further down the line of AI and actually start to understand the brain/consciousness. People will say funding or lobbying or that migraine research is too new, frankly it’s none of those things. Time is what it will take. People here don’t seem to realize how groundbreaking it has been for CGRPs to come out, new migraine drug classes don’t come about very often. Progress is happening.
Different fields of studies mate, I wouldn't be surprised if a computer scientist having a difficulty in how to find cancer cells
Because AI is literally buzzword, there is no common definition of intelligence and AI is often used to refer to normal programming (usually to misslead people, kinda like what people did with the word quantumn)
Most commonly AI refers to machine learning which includes a broad range of tasks, but generally can be summarized as the use of statistic, probabillity and visualizations to identify shit or to help find patterns in data.
Deeplearning is when these models are coupled together to do more complex things, fx. "is this a dog? Tell me what it looks like" (I think, i havent gotten that far in my studies yet. :) )
For reference i study AI and data at DTU in Denmark
I asked about this a while back in case you're interested in that prior discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/migraine/s/UdidFXd9Xt
I think it’s partly because it’s difficult to see what all is happening while a person actively has a migraine. How often could that timing work out? If I have a bad episode the last thing I would want to do is load up in the car, get driven to a hospital and have a bunch of tests run. You’d probably need to have something like a sleep lab situation with all the electrodes on and somehow induce a migraine so they could capture it. Even if all the stars aligned so that could happen, what all can they tell from purely external scans? What if the condition includes some element of chemical or hormonal imbalance. Would there be some way of testing the effects of light, sounds, smells and (whatever else makes the brain goblins do their thing during an attack).
I’d imagine that at some point it would be helpful to physically examine the actual brain, spinal fluid and even slice it all up so they could examine specific area’s that appear related in minute detail. (If they played their cards right I’d volunteer for that one if the migraine was bad enough lol)
Computer chips and programs were created and evolved by us to perform specific tasks, which other people picked up and said “ok, but what if…” for hundreds of thousands of iterations and branches of uses etc. Even those have ‘evolved’ to the point where I’d imagine no single person has first hand knowledge of an entire processor or advanced programs like AI.
Up until recently I imagine that trying to study migraines and puzzle out how they actually work would have been like you or me hearing someone describe a piece of music to a deaf person and expecting them to write out the score for it.
Everyone craves entertainment but not everyone has migraines.
"Your problem doesn't affect me and therefore I don't have to care." -All the lucky people
Lol. I will often think stuff like this. Outside of that you are looking at two very different technologies. AI can think like a human, but they are not using the the same biochemistry as our brains.
On of the NPs I used to work with told me that we actually do not know a lot about the brain at all. We do not even know for sure how meds work in the brain, just that they do. We have an idea, but no way to test it. She was telling me she went to a medical conference where they were talking about some neuro meds and every slide at an asterisk. The asterisk was a disclaimer saying that the route of the med being talking about was an educated guess only.
For me, it turns out they’re caused by a bunch of allergies and sensitivities.
I’m allergic to everything and I think I must have Multiple Chemical Sensitivity also cause fragrances are some of my worst triggers. Fragrance from candles or perfume or cleaning products wrecks me.
I’ve gotten absolutely devastating headaches my whole life and in the last few years I’ve finally made tremendous progress in figuring it out. Even just brief and minimal exposure to triggers can cause headaches that might last days.
I actually never realized I have allergies other than shell fish, but I was very wrong. I have a lot of food and environmental allergies and sensitivities.
I have Pollen Food Allergy Syndrome that basically makes me allergic to seemingly all plant foods. While most people with PFAS can tolerate cooked foods that doesn’t seem to help me and my reaction seems to be much worse than is common.
Since learning of these allergies I’ve gone on a carnivore diet and my sense of smell came back to such a degree it’s like hyperosmia. Which enabled me to recognize fragrances as triggers, when I might not have ever noticed any smell before.
Additionally my asthma is gone and I haven’t used an inhaler in years now.
Interestingly, supplementing with iodine also seems to be helping me a lot. I’ve read a little about iodine having some mediating effects on headaches, allergies and immune response via unknown mechanisms. I’ve only been doing small doses for about a week but it’s had some undeniable effects, including a big reduction in fatigue, improved mood and mental clarity.
I’m not saying I’m cured or anything but definitely it’s been a huge help.
Hope you all finds some relief
For me, it was low b vitamins. B1 and b2. For someone else it might be different. It’s not the same for everyone and most people are also not metabolically healthy, which doesn’t help.
If you really think about it, it's not that surprising. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the first X-RAY wasn't taken until 1895. The first commercially viable CT scanner didn't come around until the 1970's. You can't fix what you can't see. MRI's are just BEGINNING to pick up lesions in the brains of SOME Migraine sufferers. There is a ton about the human brain we don't understand. Probably because we're asking an organ to study itself if you get my meaning.
I think part of it is money as well. There are big bucks to be made in the tech sector. Finding out what causes migraines when we have treatments that (mostly) work isn’t exactly profitable :/
Because you can turn a phone off, take it completely apart, determine exactly what’s wrong with it, and put it back together.
Do that with a person and for some reason you can’t start it back up again.
Also, iPhones and AI are designed. We evolved and have a lot of weird bits that don’t make sense and extra, possibly useless, things are all over as well. And each of us is different in unknown ways. iPhones come on an assembly line.
Because there is so much we still don’t know about the brain.
A few guesses
Late Stage Capitalism: like many ppl mentioned research needs funding.
In the US at least, medical and technological research are often demand/profit motivated. As are the people are gifted or exceptional in scientific field, necessarily so. They have bills & college loans etc to pay.
There is more money in iphones and AI than migraine treatment.
Another Ex. viagra v male birth control. 🙃
See also, patriarchy and a system of medicine that ignored and invalidates women’s pain. Women are more commonly dx with migraines than men.
The brain is the only organ that studies itself. I guess brain is hiding info from brain as usual
My last migraine was so horrible that I passed out from the pain. I was 2 hours into the migraine and getting dressed after a shower and felt my body get weak from my ankles up and I hit the floor and everything went white. I was only out I think for a few seconds but still scary. I get aphasia, throwing up, auras /blind spots/Zig zags in my vision, traveling tingling, pounding headache, stiff neck, pressure pain behind my eyes but passing out was a first.
Saw a good neurologist and he wasn't too concerned. Said 45% of people with migraines have the sane issues I have. He did give me a lot of helpful information like why this is happening and what steps I need to help prevent them from happening. For me my neurologist said that vasoconstriction is my enemy, vasoconstriction is depressing activity in the occipital area of the brain and that is causing the migraines.
I've been doing anything I can to help prevent vasoconstriction. I took up yoga to help stretch out tight and locked muscles and that has helped tremendously. Getting massages helps too. You have to do your own work for 90% of this unfortunately, it is annoying 😒
It’s all about priorities
Because they don't want the migraines to be treated. Very easy.
Much more profit if you continue to buy drugs that partially help
I’m not going to argue with your sentiment, but I don’t think you should give us bald apes (humans) so much intellectual credit. Your point requires a presumption that we are just so damn smart that we’d have epic solutions for migraine if it weren’t for capitalistic greed. Yet we don’t have even have a single drug alone that partially helps everyone with migraine disease despite an enormous financial incentive for every pharma and biotech company to lock in the IP and make a bizillion dollars. Sometimes we’re just not that knowledgeable.
That’s just silly. Companies can charge more for better drugs or drugs that have to be dosed less often. If they had a migraine-crushing medication it would be on the market and making the company shit loads of money.
No way dude, do you know how much money a company would make if they figured out how to fully cure migraines? They would have complete ownership of the market putting every almost fix out of business. They could literally charge whatever they wanted…
Exactly. It's extremely hard to create cures for most chronic conditions (compared to managing symptoms), but in the rare cases where cures are invented, the payout is insane. It's pretty rare right now but the perfect example of this is gene therapy emerging for some diseases. It's a one time treatment that cures you for life and the few available rn cost between 2 and 5 million dollars.
The one-time treatment (so cure) for spinal muscular dystrophy costs $2.1 (source)
A cure for sickle cell disease is expected to come out soon and cost $1.35-2 million (source)
and these are rare diseases. The potential profits for a cure for a common disease like migraine are even higher. Millions of people are newly diagnosed every year, providing plenty of new "customers."
Pharma companies aren't not making a cure for migraine because they don't want to. They're not making one because they can't.
I work an industry tangential to this space and can confirm that this isn't true, and similar has happened with other chronic (and even life-threatening) conditions. In at least one of those cases the 'fix' was modified to be a treatment that is needed in perpetuity. The reality of a cure is that it's a one-time deal - a single transaction, regardless how large the price tag. Compare that with the ongoing revenue of treatments and it's obvious which is the better business model; every other platform under the sun is trying to get to a subscription business model, but the drug companies definitely got there first.
But they do it same way producing partially working drugs.
This!!!
Iphones make money.
That might lead to a cure. Loss revenue. Everything is about money. Same for most illnesses, but gene therapy will probably change everything. Big data and AI will too. I do research (long time) and it’s pretty much all money. See stock market.
?????
brains dude- brains are pretty fucking complicated lol???
I think you want a real answer, but since you’ve gotten a few- ima be that guy and say this is a really dumb question.
Scientists have a pretty good idea of what causes migraines. Treating them is another issue
Scientist: "We found the cause of your migraines!"
Me: sits up all excited
Scientist: "It's your breathing."
Me: "What's wrong with my breathing?"
Scientist: "Oh, nothing. It's just the thing is when you breathe, you get a migraine. Have you tried drinking more water?"
I have never seen a legitimate scientist say that they know what causes migraines. At best, we know various contributing factors and contributing mechanisms. This is very different from knowing what causes the underlying pathophysiology of migraine disease.
A couple of weeks ago my GP said to me (in a nice way) that I'm not gonna die from a migraine so they're not really a priority.