Headache care is a specialized branch of neuro- science. They can specialize all they want: headache specialists are still not quite sure where all the pieces go when they talk about migraine pain relief. But they do still have some of the pieces to go on; so far, they seem to understand this much that migraines occur to people who have very sensitive brains that are easily excited. Anything that happens to the body - the hormone changes that go with menstrual periods in women, playing video games or dancing at discos that have strobe light flashing effects - there is really no telling what each brain could find stressful. The only certainty in it all is that once it gets going, a migraine attack can last anywhere from a couple of hours to three days.
In women who happen to notice a regular occurrence of migraines around their periods, it isn't even really the hormones that harm the brain; the brain somehow seems to just work itself up over the very idea of what is to happen. Migraines have a genetic component; but that doesn't mean that there is a genetic disease that gives you pain; it is just that people with migraines are in fact inclined to have headaches, for whatever reason. Some medicines, or certain surgical procedures like a forehead lift, succeed at migraine pain relief because they are good at removing the triggers that set it off. They only work because there is nothing there to set off an attack any more; the quality in the brain that would respond to any ordinary situation with a migraine attack is completely and irretrievably elminated for life.
Migraines have been around for as long as mankind; medical experts of the time in ancient Rome found that they could lend their patients a degree of solace by granting them the migraine pain relief of electrical shocks. The electricity itself came from the electric ray fish. The migraine specialist these days can thankfully count on equipment more sophisticated than a fish out of water, thankfully, but apparently, only just barely. The new great hope in migraine treatment appears in the form of stimulatory devices. One kind tries to achieve its ends by giving you a mild electrical jolt delivered to your occipital nerve with electrodes at the top of your spine. The other kind is transcranial magnetic stimulation. It seems to work for people who have a gentle lead up to a migraine attack. The lead up usually consists of images perceived in the head of flashing lights; the device tries to use strong magnetic radiation to try to change the electrical activity in your brain.
The occipital nerve approach seems to work because that is the nerve that actually conveys to you the fact that you are hurting. Electrical disruption over there makes it difficult for you to feel what the nerve is trying to tell you. You don't actually have migraine pain relief, so much as a lack of awareness of it. The traditional view of migraines has always been seen as a circulatory problem in the brain. The blood vessels are supposed to be very constricted in migraine sufferers, and that is supposed to hurt. But more recent understanding tries to place the blame on the occipital area of the brain. If you are one of those people who gets those periods of premonition before you get a headache, what they call aura, using the transcranial magnetic stimulation method tries to disrupt the aura, and therefore shut down the headache before it starts. But whatever happens, the goal of migraine pain relief always has to be about getting at the problem before it gets out of hand. Migraine has a habit of doing that in people as they grow older.