Hello,

I am writing for a good friend of mine who is a CH sufferer. I have been with her through various cycles and am supporting her to find the solution.

We have an oxygen tank which is extremely helpful.  She has just started another cycle of headaches (after nearly 2 years). Her general cycle lasts for around 6 weeks and is comprised of only night hits (after regulating her sleeping hours). This year we started a melatonin treatment. She is currently taking 10 mgs each night of regular (under the tongue) melatonin.  Since she started with this there has been a good amount of change, saying that she feels there is a "lid" on the headaches, and only phantom headaches (which are also aborted with oxygen).

How long do people take the melatonin for? The length of the whole cycle (this would be 6 weeks in her case)? Do you just drop off at some point?  Any recommendations would be appreciated.

Thanks so much,
Amanda

Hi Hoppy,
Thanks for responding. "We" (as in my friend and I who wakes up with her) had 4 shadows and finally an attack this early morning. I just wrote another post about melatonin jump because we need do so something - it was getting better and then now worse again. We live in the middle-of-nowhere Mexico and only have the 5mg presentations. Has there ever been an issue for you doing a 10-15mg jump? Most seem to go up to 12 or 13 mgs. We´d like to try going up but don´t want to create any kind of conflict. I even read someone say that after 12 mgs the effect starts to go down.. (?).  Any ideas?

Thanks for sharing what you did.
Amanda

Melatonin is incredibly safe and with some natural supplements, you aren't getting melatonin.
Assuming you are getting real melatonin, it's safe to take forever basically. I use 10mg a night even when I'm not having headaches because it helps me get to sleep. There are some case studies where 70+ mg of melatonin was used in cancer patients with depression.

The Alchemist wrote on Dec 11^th, 2013 at 8:18pm:


Thanks for your insights - I have actually found the opposite in my reading - that episodics tend to become more normalized, or at least in a pattern of their own when they are not in a CH period. 

I had a link to post but the forum won´t let me since I don´t have enough active messages yet - later I can post it.

It´s clear that the melatonin does have some effect.  Unfortunately last night here was really difficult.  So it´s a little discouraging.  She is also on the D3 regime and had two nights which were much better than usual - the night before last there was only one hit after 6am, which was abort-able through oxygen.  So we were quite excited.  Last night however there were 6 hits though out the night, the last one in the morning.  She is still at 13mgs of melatonin, and doesn´t want to go up right now.