Filed under: Healthcare | Tags: ableism, drugs, Healthcare, medicine, willow bark
I used to be the kind of person who tried not to take any medication. If I had a headache, I’d try to avoid taking anything for it out of some sense of nobility or stoicism. Maybe I thought it made me strong to suffer? Maybe I thought it somehow made me a better person? Now that I know that some of those headaches were probably migraines, I understand that this was exactly the wrong strategy. Pretty much every migraine medication works better the sooner you take it.
This tough guy approach of resisting medication is very common in this country. I think of former Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (remember him? Oof) who recommended aspirin and toughing it out for any kind of pain. It’s odd, because on one hand, sure, we are an overmedicated nation. The story is that we take pills for everything and use medication for things we shouldn’t. There is an opioid crisis, after all. But simultaneously, as a nation, we have a strong skepticism about medicine. We’ll take unregulated supplements, unrestricted herbal remedies and expensive “natural” medicines. Like many American things, we’re on a wild pendulum of being both overmedicated and undermedicated simultaneously.
Before migraine entered my life, I took the occasional Advil and that was about it for me and medicine. If I absolutely needed anti-biotics, I’d take them but I was never happy about it. I did not have a pharmacy and I was very dismissive of the need for medication. I’m sorry. I recognize now how extremely ableist my drive to avoid medication could be. Ultimately, it was a privilege to which I was blind.
The first time I got a medication that effectively stopped a migraine, I was instantly converted to the wonders of modern medicine. Before I got working medicine, I’d tried everything. I’d tried any number of “natural’ supplements. I’d tried chanting. I’d tried moving and not moving. I’d tried magnesium and B12 infusions. I’d tried vision therapy, physical therapy, color therapy and I don’t even remember all the things I tried. But it was medicine that made the difference. It was medicine that was a miracle. And of all the times in history to have to deal with migraines, this is the best time so far because there is a lot of progress in migraine medicine right now. In the seven years that I’ve been dealing with this, multiple new medications have become available. A situation that was more or less hopeless when I was diagnosed has become a world where there are new things to try every year. That’s because of developments in medicine. Both medicine in the practice sense and just…like…medicine. And when you need them, medicines are miracles.
Are drug companies evil? For sure. But they’re also miracle workers? So it’s a little bit confusing.
To be honest, in terms of my migraine situation, I’d come to accept a kind of shitty status quo because it was so much better than what came before it and then, at my last visit with my neurologist, she suggested I try a new drug alongside the ones that are currently helping me. I have to inject it once a month, but if it works, it could cut my migraines in half, maybe even hold them off entirely. If it works, it will be a miracle.
There is the occasional person for whom medicine is not the answer for migraines. I see them pop up in the migraine subreddit sometimes. They’ll announce that they made this one simple change to their diet and poof! Or they tried magnesium and never had another migraine. Or then there’s someone who will ask how to treat migraines “naturally.” Folks will good-naturedly list various home remedies but inevitably the answer is probably drugs and they’ll gently suggest that it might be worth trying some medicine. The ableist streak that runs through our country like a river thinks there is some virtue to abstaining from the one thing that could stop our suffering – as if there is some extra morality to avoiding medicine. It’s like we all took the Just Say No anti-drug campaign too much to heart and just apply it to everything.
But crack is a different drug than a migraine stopper. Sure, they both feature some chemical adjustment but just saying no to something that can keep you from suffering for days at a time is actually detrimental to the quality of your life.
And as evil as drug companies can be, they do go through extensive testing and trials to make sure that what they give us is reasonably safe. There are regulations around medication that are not in place for supplements. Remember when everyone was taking St John’s Wort for their mental health back in the 90s? And then it turned out that St John’s Wort made almost every other medication less effective and sometimes super dangerous?
I am not here to praise drug companies but some of what they make is incredibly helpful. Their stuff saves lives sometimes, you know? Sometimes things we need are not made by the best people or organizations.
My new (hopefully miracle) drug is made by Eli Lilly – who recently fell into some hot water about how much they charge for insulin. They are not the good guys. But what they make may be making a lot of people’s lives a lot better. My little injector pen looks like the medicine on the sci fi show, The Expanse. It’s space medicine! Here on Earth! I still don’t know if it will do the job for me but it’s great that there’s something to try. But is it natural?
Our romantic ideas of what is natural are something we need to think about. I think about that aspirin that Jefferson Beauregard Sessions recommended. Back before we had aspirin, people would chew on willow bark to relieve their pain and if there were an apocalypse and there was no more aspirin, maybe we’d have to do that again. But the thing of it is – it’s probably a better idea to just take a couple of aspirin if you have access to aspirin, than it would be to chew on willow bark. It will be more consistent and more likely to have been made in a sanitary environment. Sure, it is more fun to imagine a medicine woman boiling up willow bark tea in a cauldron but we are very lucky we can just buy some aspirin at the store.
But come the apocalypse, I don’t know what I’d do without migraine meds. They’re not as simple as willow bark. It’s likely I’d be suffering for days at a time, trying to find a frozen stream to dunk my head into, longing for the days of good medicine.
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