Glenn,
40 years is a long time to battle with CH's.  I am on year 33 or 34 and I just turned 45 yrs old. 

Many people I have spoke with who are "older" than me, say that they "aged out" and/or noticed a reduction in frequency and intensity as they got older.  So hopefully you and I and everybody else are on this path to relief as we age.

Your suggestion of Percocet to help others is, with all due respect, very ignorant of you.  However, your suggestion of taking vitamins is very worthy in the treatment of CH's.

Although you may be "experienced", you still have much to learn about proper CH treatment.  For starters, pain killers are nothing but ineffective treatment and a living nightmare guaranteed to happen.  Please stick around and do some reading.  I am confident you will be amazed with our discoveries we share together about proper transitional, preventive and abortive treatments.

Run away from the narcotics and load up on the vitamins!
Take care.

-Gregg in Las Vegas

As a 26 year old who just recently started to get headaches, I've found that prescription drugs do help to a slight degree.

Yes they are hard to obtain and can be high addictive with plenty of side effects and more importantly, No, they don't relieve the pain in a timely fashion.


But, when I first went to the ER, they gave me a prescription for Norco. The hydrocodone was not helping at all UNTIL I took a dosage that would actually affect my mood (read made me feel drowsy and giggly and thank goodness I was not operating heavy machinery).

For those two days, whenever a CH would come, it was at least 50% less intensity.

I am not supporting pain killers as a viable option. For me, the painkillers helped me center myself and take the next steps to figure out what was going on while giving me a much needed break from the pain. If I had not had that breather, I would have never been able to do research on cluster headaches and eliminate teh triggers. As I realized certain things would trigger attacks, I simply cut them out.
Cigarettes? out. Pack a day smoker for 6 years. I'm done.
Easy and simple as that. I will do ANYTHING to relieve myself of the pain.

(When im sick, i don't eat as i have no appetite. for me, hunger wrecks my stomach along with my blood sugar levels, preparing the way for a MASSIVE CH at either my next meal or when my body decides something. once i figured that out, i started eating small snacks/meals regularly).



Of course, as soon as I ran out, the pain was back and I realized the difference the pills made. I almost ran out to get somemore before I realized my actions were eerily similar to that of a drug addicts.

As I thought about it, I realized I longed for the drug and could even possibly be addicted (after dosing for 2 days haha). And it wasn't the "feeling of euphoria" that I was seeking but the normalcy, the lack of pain that came with taking the pills. There are moments during attacks where we're literally willing to do anythign to make the pain go away. These painkillers can make them go away. It's a very dangerous road and I personally would not recommend it to ANYONE.

But try to understand an addict. They started off the same as the rest of us, just trying to deal with the pain.

There is a very very small minority of CH'ers who use opiates for their pain. It's an incredibly hazardous road to go down. We have many members who have gone down this road and gone through hell getting their life back. This post is from one of our more respected members, who very eloquently puts into words what that hell is like:

Multimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!!  You need to or

PLEASE, be sure you have exhausted all avenues before going down this road, slippery slope does not begin to describe it.

Joe