Medications to treat migraines have come a long way over the last 30 years. In this video, Mark Green, MD, director of the Center for Headache and Pain Medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, explains how modern treatments differ.
Things have become dramatically different from when I started practicing headache in 1978. In those days, there were two general approaches to migraine in terms of medication, one were drugs which knocked you out, and the feeling was that if you were stressed and you had a migraine, we just had to make you relax and be unstressed. And then there were, what were called migraine specific drugs which had to do with constriction of arteries, because the theory was that migraine had to with dilation or enlargement or arteries, all that went out the window, and we no longer are in interested in simply constricting and dampening blood vessel size, and we're no longer interested in knocking you out. In fact, we're interested in, can we treat your migraines and have you return to work.
So it's changed a lot.
A migraine is no ordinary headache, and migraines affect more than 1 in 8 American adults. Get expert information about migraine triggers and treatment, including how smart nutrition and watching the weather can help prevent the pain.
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