The Headache
The Science of a Most Confounding Affliction—and a Search for Relief
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
"Required reading for anyone with a head."—Mary Roach, New York Times bestselling author of Stiff and Fuzz
"[The Headache] weaves together history, biology, a survey of current research, testimony from patients, and an agonizing account of Zeller’s own suffering. . . If there’s a lesson here, it’s that pain resists mastery, but understanding, however incomplete, can offer its own form of relief."—New Yorker
From blinding migraines to severe headache disorders known as “clusters,” chronic head pain affects 40% of the population, many of them suffering in silence. Finally, The Headache reveals the science behind a group of disorders that is as much a curse as a cultural punchline, and leads to key insights into the nature of pain itself.
Guided by his own decades-long struggle with cluster headaches, veteran science journalist Tom Zeller Jr.’s journey into headache science is at once intimate and panoramic. He visits cutting-edge clinics; interviews dozens of doctors, neurologists, and fellow headache patients; participates in clinical trials for multi-million-dollar new medicines; and even experiments with psilocybin in search of relief.
Along the way, Zeller traces the longer arc of mystery around headaches, from prehistoric skull surgery to Virginia Woolf’s assertion that, in the throes of a migraine, “language runs dry,” to reveal how headaches became one of the most under-researched afflictions in medicine—and how that is slowly starting to change.
With warmth, wit, and infectious curiosity, Zeller’s search for the origins of his own headaches becomes a journey into the inner workings of the human nervous system, and an invaluable witness to one of the most maligned conditions known to medicine.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Headaches can be "among the worst pain disorders known to human beings," according to studies journalist Zeller cites in his moving debut. Noting that he has suffered from cluster headaches for over 30 years, Zeller recounts "writhing on the bathroom floor" and collapsing unconscious from pain, and traces the history of treatments for cluster headaches and the more common migraine (around 12,000 years ago, sufferers often underwent trepanation, or the drilling of a hole in the skull to relieve pressure). Contending that remarkably little is actually understood about headaches, Zeller points out that basic questions about their causes remain unresolved, and that they are frequently dismissed as "just a headache." He explains the current landscape of solutions and cures, including stress reduction and relaxation therapy, and writes that while these may help, for most people, they're as practical as "meditating your way out of cancer." Zeller is a strong writer, especially when it comes to describing pain: "It's all just poetry in the end—like trying to describe the color of an atom, or the texture of gravity, or the shape of sadness." The result is an eye-opening study of an all-too-common affliction.
