Help for Headaches

By incorporating yoga into your life, you can reduce the severity and frequency of painful episodes, or ease an ache as soon as it starts.

By Jennifer Pirtle

For more than six years, Catherine Slaton, 46, of Seattle, lost several days of each month to migraines. Sometimes the pain behind her right eye was so severe that she "felt like cutting off her head," she says. Curled on the floor in a darkened room, Slaton would lose consciousness and then sleep for several hours. The respite, however, was only temporary: When she awoke, the headache remained, as intense as ever.

"I tried absolutely everything to get rid of them and prevent the next one from happening," Slaton says. Her efforts ranged from chiropractic work, craniosacral therapy, and herbs to hormone therapy and "massive doses of whatever my neurologist prescribed for me, including pills, nasal sprays, and shots," she remembers. Nothing helped.

Then, a year ago, Slaton began taking hatha yoga classes twice weekly at Spectrum Dance Theater, a studio near her home. Initially, she went to ease the pain caused by a bulging disk in her lower back. "Not only did the yoga help with my back condition, but after a few months, my migraines were noticeably less severe," she says. "In the last three months, I've had no trace of a headache." Slaton credits asana and pranayama with allowing her to feel normal again.

Understanding the Ache

As more than 45 million Americans can attest, chronic headaches that are serious enough to interfere with daily life are complicated and debilitating. But like Slaton, many headache sufferers are discovering that yoga can safely help reduce the severity and frequency of their episodes as well as short-circuit those already in progress. They're also finding that yoga can be used as a complementary therapy to other types of treatment without the risk of dangerous side effects.

While stress or illness is often blamed for headache pain, factors such as family history, food additives, hormonal fluctuations, disrupted sleep patterns, and lack of exercise are also likely to influence outbreaks (see "Hidden Triggers,"). And some methods of treatment do more harm than good: Using over-the-counter pain relief medications (and some prescription ones) more than three times a week, for example, can cause "rebound" headaches in certain individuals, according to Todd Troost, M.D., chairman of neurology at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Complexities also arise because headaches are often misdiagnosed. "Most people incorrectly assume they have tension-type or sinus headaches, but in reality, more than 90 percent of these people have migraines," says Jan Lewis Brandes, M.D., clinical instructor in the Department of Neurology at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, and president-elect of the American Council for Headache Education. Although migraines are often equated with nausea, one-sided head pain, and sensitivity to light and sound, many migraine sufferers don't experience all of these symptoms.

In the past, it was thought that migraines were caused by a constriction of arteries in the head, while tension-type headaches were the result of strained muscles in the neck and scalp. Although the entire cascade of events leading up to a headache is not completely understood, many researchers now believe that an imbalance in the brain's neurotransmitters, the chemicals that act as messengers between cells in the brain and the nervous system, lies at the heart of both types. (In fact, the term "tension headache" was recently changed to "tension-type headache," calling attention to the fact that muscle tension may not be the main cause.)

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