Posted by Todd (216.199.4.16) on January 22, 2000 at 20:27:34:
In Reply to: Very good. posted by drummer on January 22, 2000 at 19:44:13:
Appreciate your open-mindedness, as well as your input.
Let me toss some wood on the old fire here.
I almost always agree with garyg, but I have to take exception to his recent post about acupuncture. As I recall, several (not many) other people have posted that acupuncture has helped them. I TOTALLY agree with his point that none of them has the depth of experience to claim it is a 'cure'.
Others have talked about various 'bio-feedback', 'spiritual', 'mind-control', 'natural' et al treatment regimins, including gary, you and myself.
If you compile all these individualistic, first person testimonies and toss them in the old blender, the puree which comes out looks a LOT like we can influence the frequency, duration and severity of attacks and cycles through psychological means. Is it the acupuncture or the belief in the accupunture which is affecting the clusters? If it were the acupuncture itself, why doesn't it work for more of us who've tried it? Why does it only seem to work for those who believe it works? And here I'm again only using acupuncture as an example. I could just as well cite water, water, water or any of many other apparent treatments.
IF there is a psychological element, doesn't it make sense that this extends to the question of what makes chronics and episodics "different"?
This no more implies that chronics are 'inferior' to episodics than saying people who prefer blue to green are 'better' or 'worse' than one another. It merely opens another avenue of discussion and investigation.
I don't for a second believe that your "... talking, learning, reading, ... and searching the Internet and stuff like that about Cluster Headaches, prolong my "cycle" and/or frequency and/or severity of attacks"
My thought is that your "thinking", "fears" and "personality" [three words I excised from the above cut and paste and replaced with "..." so as not to be accused of misquoting] MIGHT prolong your cycle. Can I "prove" this? Heck no. If I could, it wouldn't be an idea, it would be a conclusion.
I guess this means I'm tossing my hat [at least for the purposes of this particular thread] into the camp that says that a chronic is just an episodic with a very long 'cycle'. Is this true? I don't know. But as you pointed out, Dr. Goadsby found exactly the same physical abnormality in both chronics and episodics and also in 'in cycle' and 'out of cycle' episodics.
If the difference between chronics and episodics isn't physical, then what else might it be other than pyschological?
Disclaimer
No conclusions are intended or implied in the above statements. They are offered for thought provoking and discussion stimulating purposes only.
KTSSU,
T