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Marijuana Vs. Migraines: Modern Medical Miracle
06-30-08|Salem-News|Dr. Phillip Leveque

Phillip Leveque has spent his life as a Combat Infantryman, Physician, Toxicologist and Pharmacologist. He is an expert in medical marijuana treatment.

Migraine headaches are possibly one of the most misunderstood maladies of man. The Merck Manual states “The cause is unknown and the pathophysiology (mechanism) is not fully understood.” Except that it has something to do with brain blood vessel dilation/constriction; nobody seems to know what is going on here. If I’m wrong about this I’m sure I will hear plenty.

To save myself professional embarrassment, I checked the Merck Manual. One would think some mad scientist produced the highly diverse pot pourri of drugs which have been used to alleviate these severe and paralyzing headaches, with nausea and vomiting, which affect some 10 million people in the U.S.

To start with, migraines are headaches but not all headaches are migraines. Many headaches can be successfully treated with aspirin or Tylenol but, if my patients are correct, they don’t touch migraines. Because of the extremely wide variety of non-effective medicines, which have been used, I take a dim view of any new medicine being heavily advertised on TV.

In my own regular medical practice I discovered that an injection of Demerol with Benadryl was effective but the patient was out of action for at least 24 hours.

When I stared seeing patients for Medical Marijuana permits, I was surprised when the first migraine patient showed up. I knew that marijuana worked for severe pain, nausea and vomiting and I knew that it also causes vasodilatation but I couldn’t quite put the two together, pharmacologically, for migraines.

The light bulb over my head lit up and I said to myself “if the patient says marijuana works for this, and they were willing to pay the $300 clinic and State fee, it must work”.

I ended up with about 30 migraine patients out of 4,000. I have since heard that the California Marijuana doctors, with some 300,000 patients, have the same experience.

I hope readers of this series will write in their own experiences about this.

[Admin note: I had chronic migraines for several years and still get the occasional one. Not that I have any medical expertise, but after reading the article it occurred to me that I cannot recall ever having a migraine and being high at the same time... and I had a lot of them.]

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Vicki

I also suffer from migraines, but they haven't been as bad in recent years. They were ungodly horrible when I was pregnant, the whole nine months. I can honestly say that I have never had a migraine after using marijuana. There were a few years I didn't toke, so I didn't have marijuana to use for them. Instead, I was prescribed RX drugs.

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Buzzby

I've developed a technique to cure migraines through a form of meditation. Before I did that, a few tokes and a couple of aspirin did the job.

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