June 27th, 2008
Zap away your worst migraine
I happen to be a lifetime connoisseur of headaches.
By that I don’t mean I enjoy them. I’ve just had about every kind of headache you can have. Ask my wife or mother.
The worst of them is the dreaded migraine.
My normal migraine cure is a fistful of painkiller and a long, long nap. But maybe there’s a better way.
In Boston, at the same time as the Red Hat Summit, doctors were at the American Headache Society’s 50th annual meeting going ga-ga over a hairdryer-sized box you put behind your head. It zaps away headaches with magnetism.
Developed at Ohio State and pushed by a California outfit called Neuralieve it goes by the headache-inducing name of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS).
According to the company’s press release, TMS has been used for years to study the brain. The machine zaps the Cortical Spreading Depression (CSP) that makes migraines the Parmesano Reggiano, the Rolls Royce if you will, of headaches.
Product Reviews Network, from which the above picture is taken, calls it the migraine zapper. I don’t care what you call it.
I want one.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 06/30/08
