FWIW, I'd like to point out that this is a better 'help me' post than most of the posts I see go by on LW, because Alicorn kept a data series. It's not perfect by any means and there's a lot of data she could collect in practice or theory, but still, she recorded something.
Headaches can be a symptom of a wide variety of things. You previously wrote an article about having been anemic, and starting to take iron supplements. This seems like the place to start. Your blood iron could still be weird; the anemia could be a symptom of something else, which also causes headaches; and having had one serious deficiency, it is much more likely that you have another.
The following additional data would be useful. (The symptom-related questions are mostly things that showed up researching iron deficiency-related things on wikipedia.)
But you're basically saying that if my wife starts punching me in the mouth every day, then I should stay with her just because I made a long term commitment.
No, I'm saying that if a masked person breaks into your house and punches you in the face and runs away, and it could be any of a couple dozen people only one of whom is your wife, divorcing her probably isn't the first step.
I put 75% probability on you having celiac disease. It explains the headaches, iron deficiency anemia, peripheral neuropathy, swelling, and burning sensation in the skin (all reported in this thread). If it is not celiac disease, it is something that has not been mentioned in this thread; all of the other hypotheses given thus far are obviously implausible.
There are relevant blood tests, although they can produce false negatives. I recommend trying a gluten-free diet for two weeks, and seeing if your symptoms subside. Vitamins are also a good idea to mitigate some of the damage and help you recover.
Since you have supplied a probability, want to bet?
Okay. I'll accept any bet that gives me better than 1:3 odds, up to a maximum risk of $100.
Please don't set up a perverse incentive to misdiagnose yourself, though.
Do you want to bet my $30 versus your $90 or not?
parameters: I will get tested for celiac. If the test comes back positive, you win; if it comes back negative, I win; if for some reason the doctor thinks I can't reasonably have celiac and won't test me for it, the bet's off; if the doctor wants to pursue other possible explanations for my headaches first and one of them turns out to be correct, I win; if the test comes back inconclusive and the doctor tells me to go without gluten for a period of time such that I'm willing to try it, then the bet turns out according to the results of the dietary test; if the doctor says I need to try going without gluten for six months or something really intrusive like that without compelling evidence that I have celiac, I'm not going to do that, and the bet is off. If none of these conditions obtains by New Year's, bet is off.
Accepted.
Sprue screening came back in the mail today. Negative. Do you want to see a scan of it, or just paypal me the ninety bucks? alicorn24@gmail.com is the paypal address :)
bread bread bread yay bread bread bread yay
Payment sent, with my condolences, as this means you still don't have a diagnosis and have to keep being unhealthy and miserable.
At this point, I would:
But most of all, just remember: sooner or later you will figure this out, and when you do, your life and subjective well-being will take a dramatic upswing.
Have you tried drinking a lot of water?
I frequently find myself insufficiently hydrated. Symptoms of dehydration are headaches, mood swings, and dizziness or lightheadedness. You mention that your headaches are worse when you work out, which may be a flag for this. Anemia also shares some symptoms with dehydration.
Thirst is not a good dehydration indicator for some people. I can easily get so dehydrated that I'll get dizzy when I stand up, and I still won't realize it was caused by dehydration until I go over everything in my health diary. It's poss...
I think you're on the right track with diet - headaches on a semiregular daily schedule sounds a lot like consumption of food on a semiregular daily schedule. Nothing in the data set jumped out at me straight away, so I expect it will be a hard-to-find dietary problem. "All your life" suggests a widely available property, such that its presence is invariant over changes in location and diet.
Ctrl-f "no headache" didn't help much.
Based on this line of reasoning, I suspect a mild gluten intolerance. The only test I'm aware of is rather ex...
Are you only listing one of the meals you ate or is this complete? You are often only eating one meal a day?
I have a hypothesis. It is possible that painkiller withdrawal is the cause of at least some of your headaches. According to Wikipedia, ibuprofen can cause rebound headaches, and you've been taking ibuprofen regularly for a long time.
Does caffeine help your headaches? Caffeine is a vasoconstrictor, which can help with certain kinds of headaches. This could help determine what kind of headaches you have.
I didn't look at your diet, but I presume you'll proceed to look for non-diet factors you could manipulate to reduce your headaches if you find no promising dietary ideas.
I think the first thing to check (due to being reasonably likely as well as easy to test) is eye sight: If you don't wear glasses maybe and eye test would show that you are near or far sighted. (That you woke up with a headache suggests otherwise but it is still a possibility)
I don't have any specific suggestions for you about headache causes.
Curetogether is crowdsourcing site to help people help each other figure out what's causing their health problems. The founder started it to deal with her headaches: http://quantifiedself.com/self-experiment/ http://curetogether.com/chronic-daily-headache/survey/symptoms/
Time of day seemed to be a significant factor in discovering the cause for her. That may be something you want to add to your logs.
There are always a lot of factors, and formalizing your experiments may help you figure out...
I can't tell from your log when you ate in relation to when the headaches come on.
One possibility that occurs to me is that your headaches might be occurring when your glucose levels are low, if you are prone to hypoglycemia. You can figure that out by observing if you tend to get the headaches when you haven't eaten for a few hours or more or/and by testing your glucose levels. If that does tend to be a problem, making sure that you have protein or/and some fat with your meals and frequent meals or snacks should help. Also, trying to avoid too simple carbohydrates and sugary foods, which cause glucose levels to spike and then plummet will help.
Sorry for coming in late, but: headaches that start abruptly (as in "four months ago"), are this disruptive, and keep going on for months should be checked out by a doctor.
You moved three time zones in the middle of the problem, and you are not reporting a big change in frequency/severity. This makes random outside factors less likely. While food can be a cause of headaches, it is actually not that frequent of a cause, and usually a clear link can be found - especially if someone gathers extensive data like you did.
If you really want to avoid m...
Are your headaches migraine-like, eg. do they get worse with light, loudness, movement, are they stingy and pulsating? Do you get ill (puking one time would have been again the antibiotics?) ? Do you get auras, eg. anything that falls under "weird neurological phenomenons"- lights, not being able to speak, read, geometrical patterns, anything?
Before I looked at your list, I bet at Histamine-intolerance, especially because of the symptoms you mentioned here and the fact that Ibuprufen works. I predicted lots of histamin-rich foods, basically every...
My headaches mostly went away with daily flaxseed oil or fish oil. I have no particular reason to expect you'd see the same, but it's easy to try. I take 1 or 2 tablespoons of flaxseed oil per day.
You are me. I used to have nearly constant headaches. Eventually after trying everything else I went to an allergist and found that I'm allergic to most types of pollen, dust and animal dander. I started taking Zyrtek every morning and the change in my lifestyle was shocking.
If you try anything from this thread, try taking Zyrtek in the morning.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned: do you snore or have trouble sleeping?
If we assume that it's some external factor, and that this factor doesn't always give you a headache, the possible signal/noise of the data goes right down the drain.
I'm asking a GP if I can get tested for Celiac (assuming that includes a test for gluten sensitivity) next week!
A guy I know from elsewhere said that your most likely problem was a B deficiency -- he said that once he saw that one of your comments ruled out his initial guess (which had been iron deficiency).
Anyway, just transferring what he said... I don't know enough about physiology/medicine to evaluate his estimation myself.
Downvoted for having nothing to do with rationality
Having said that, I used to get frequent headaches and I found that eating salty food would kill them. My diet sounds pretty similar to yours and I am also vegetarian. Maybe we lack salt.
It could be non-food-related of course - is there something particular about the places you spend most time? Ie., chemical or otherwise? Did you rule out something psychosomatic?
Have you ever tried edible or vaporized cannabis as treatment? Preferably a Indica heavy blend.
Have you ever tried using a humidifier (at night or just in general)? Dry sinuses are way more susceptible to allergens, and there are plenty of ubiquitous allergens that could be responsible for your headaches no matter where you live.
Do you wear a retainer or any other kind of orthodontic device? I still wear a retainer now and then, and I often get a very severe headache the first night I wear it (I only wear it at night sometimes) if I've forgotten to wear it for a longer period than usual.
Don't know if that's at all relevant to your case, but am throwing it out there just in case.
Perhaps you could tell us--if it's not too personal--what potential diagnoses you have already looked into/been tested for/discussed with a doctor.
I remember at one point you mentioned you don't like to exercise because it causes you to sweat. I think both are crucial components of a healthy lifestyle. Sweating, in particular, serves as an important way for the body to dispose of toxins. It may be that there are some toxins that are harmless to most people, because they sweat them out, but which are gradually bioaccumulating in your body and causing your headaches.
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jan/28/health/he-skeptic28 :
...The bottom line: Sweat does contain trace amounts of toxins, says Dr. Dee Anna Glaser, a professor of dermatology at St. Louis University and founding member of the International Hyperhidrosis Society, a medical group dedicated to the study and treatment of heavy sweating.
But, Glaser, adds, in the big picture, sweat has only one function: Cooling you down when you overheat. "Sweating for the sake of sweating has no benefits," she says. "Sweating heavily is not going to release a lot of toxins."
In fact, Glaser says, heavy sweating can impair your body's natural detoxification system. As she explains, the liver and kidneys -- not the sweat glands -- are the organs we count on to filter toxins from our blood. If you don't drink enough water to compensate for a good sweat, dehydration could stress the kidneys and keep them from doing their job. "If you're not careful, heavy sweating can be a bad thing," she says.
Sweating definitely won't help clear the body of mercury or other metals, says Donald Smith, a professor of environmental toxicology at UC Santa Cruz, who studies treatments for metal p
If this is your real diet then I am shocked at it, and and not surprised that it might make you sick in one or more ways.
As others have said headaches can have many causes, and even this diet might be unrelated.
As for the most likely cause, i would point to the milk. According to studies i don't have links to up to 76% of adults are allergic to cow milk. It takes a while and sometime high amounts for symptoms to start showing, it also takes a while to make them go away again. You could try not drinking milk at all for about a month and see what for effect ...
Trepanation is an ancient cure for headaches. It's discouraged by the modern medical establishment but they (of course) has ulterior motives. It's definitely at least worth researching.
The particular problem the allergist was hunting is that sometimes, the palms of my hands (especially the fingers) swell up and feel warm and itchy. This isn't profound enough to be that visible - they're slightly red and puffy but it's nothing dramatic - but it makes it challenging to bend my fingers all the way and it's uncomfortable. It happens at seemingly random times, indoors and out, and goes away by itself after some minutes. It can be either hand; sometimes it's both at once. It used to happen more often and has slowed way down; the last time it happened to me was sometime in maybe June, I think.
Other random unexplained problems:
Permanent itch on the outside of the heel of my left foot. (Since roughly 2007.)
Weird dyspnea causing me to gasp, sigh, and yawn a lot, but I never pass out, and my bloodwork and PFT and stress echo all came back normal. (Since roughly 2008, worsening gradually.)
Heart palpitations, intermittent. (Since earlier this year.)
Sometimes for no reason one or both of my ears gets red and feels hot, as though it's sunburned; this goes away by itself after about an hour. (Since the 2008/2009 winter, hasn't happened in a while).
I've been collecting data about my headaches and diet for almost four months now. I don't see any patterns - annoyingly, I get headaches nearly every day, so there's not much information - but I thought I'd post the data set and see if anyone sees anything. Here it is. Hopefully someone finds this an interesting problem.
It's written in note-to-self format (abbreviations like "strawbs" for "strawberries"; if I mention a complicated dish once then I'll shorten it when I eat the leftovers, as "pasta" for "pasta with artichokes and spinach and pesto"; times given approximately and not in a consistent form and often without specifying if they're a.m. or p.m., though they are in chronological order). Quantities aren't given, although if they're suspected to be relevant I may be able to remember specific instances (for unusual foods) or typical portions (for ordinary foods) - other details might also be recollectable similarly. I also don't notice when headaches go away, so I don't know how long they last except when they last all day or become noticeably worse during their course. My sleep schedule varied considerably over this period, but trends more night owl than early bird (for a while I was outright nocturnal). I moved three time zones west at the end of July, should that matter at all.
I'm not soliciting commentary on my diet except insofar as it can be compellingly related to my headaches.
ETA: Assume that every single day I'm drinking lots of skim milk. (2-6 cups depending on how much I eat and how it's spaced out.) There's a couple of exceptions, mostly when I'm in transit for most of a day or run out of milk, but not many and they don't seem to correlate with headaches.