My name is Tomas Correa, I've had CH since I was 13, I'm 33 now. I was first diagnosed with CH in the US when I worked there as a Geologist, before that, I was treated as a migraine sufferer in Colombia, my home country. My kind of CH is episodic, I get them every day for about a month, sometimes three times a day, and then it just disappears for a whole year. I've been treated with verapamil, gabapentin, triptans and accupuncture, but during this episode only oxygen seemed to work until I found this web page and started trying some of the things that other fellows have tried.  This time, during an episode I hyperventilated for about 15 minutes and the pain went away. Please be careful if you are going to try it as hyperventilating might be dangerous if you exceed your limits; the way I did it was breathing at a high frequency taking deep breaths using an abdominal breathing. Please let me know if this works out for somebody else....
Today when I was starting to experiment the shadows I drank an energy drink and the pain also went away. Something I've learned during this years is that not everything works for everybody and that, as someone wrote before me, what worked before doesn't necessarily is going to work later, which is why you need to have all kinds of tricks in case you need them.
This website has been a refreshing find for me during this episode of CH, I've read a lot of the messages, some of them scare me, some of them made me cry but most of them gave me support, which is what I was looking for.
I want to express my gratitude to the people who make the effort to keep this website, it is great to know you are all out there wiling to share and give support all around the world. King regards.

Hi Tomas and welcome.

Verapamil normally works pretty well for most people, however often people aren't give a high enough dose for it to be effective. Many people need 360-480mg a day although some go to 1000mg.

Accupuncture has no track record with helping with CH.

With triptans the most commonly one used with CH is imitrex, either the injections or the nasal spray (tablets are too slow to take effect).

Have you read our page on oxygen (Multimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!!  You need to or it has a load of useful info that can help you get the best out of it, including how well hyperventilating works to abort even quicker as you've found out.

Energy drinks work pretty well too when you've nothing else around. Just drink a can as rapidly as possible when you feel a CH about to start. I've no idea why "normal" people drink them but for CH they can help reduce the intensity and duration of a CH.

Keep reading and you'll soon be an expert on CH.

Hi there, thanks for all the good advises!!
Regarding D3 vitamin, I hadn't read it before, with a 60% success rate it is worth trying, I'll check it out.
I have the energy drink can ready to be chugged down if I get shadows, hopefully I won't need it today.
I've used oxygen only when the pain starts at night simply because by the time it wakes me up, there is nothing else for me to do that ask my wife to take me to the ER to get the oxygen. I haven't searched if it is easy to get medical oxygen here in Colombia, I bet it is. What I don't like is the size of the tank (M size) and the danger of having something like that stored at home, but if it is what it will take to avoid going to the ER at night, it might be the solution I need...
I forgot to mention that during this last month I found out  that two pills of Excedrine Migrane makes the pain go away as long as I take them when I start experiencing the shadows. Last year I used something that here in Colombia is called Migragesin, which is Sumatriptan at 8%, and that combined with the Gabapentin worked most of the times, but as I mentioned, this year none of that worked.
Something that I would like to know is if someone here has tried psylocibine, in some other forums I've read interesting results and I even found the original paper written in 2006 by Sewell et al, although to tell you the truth it scares the heck out of me because I've never experienced with those sorts of things.
The good news is that my "cycle" is coming to an end, the time between pain episodes is starting to get longer every day and I don't get them at night anymore.

I read an abstract of the Sewell article and found it rather positive.

But I'm conservative when it comes to how we treat our body and so use treatments which have a good record of outcome studies--regrdless of the particular problem.

I suspect that you will not have any problems getting copies of both of this articles:
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Select item 17072817
1.Rev Neurol. 2006 Nov 1-15;43(9):571-2.
[Chronic cluster headache: Response to psilocybin].
[Article in Spanish]
Sempere AP, Berenguer-Ruiz L, Almazán F.
PMID:17072817[PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] Free full text
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Neurology. 2006 Jun 27;66(12):1920-2.
Response of cluster headache to psilocybin and LSD.
Sewell RA1, Halpern JH, Pope HG Jr.
Author information1Clinical Research Laboratory, Alcohol and Drug Abuse Research Center, McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Belmont, MA 02478, USA. asewell@mclean.harvard.edu
Abstract
The authors interviewed 53 cluster headache patients who had used psilocybin or lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) to treat their condition. Twenty-two of 26 psilocybin users reported that psilocybin aborted attacks; 25 of 48 psilocybin users and 7 of 8 LSD users reported cluster period termination; 18 of 19 psilocybin users and 4 of 5 LSD users reported remission period extension. Research on the effects of psilocybin and LSD on cluster headache may be warranted.

Hi everyone. After one and a half years, the “painful friend” is back. A couple of things have been working for me and I had been able to keep it at bay with energy drinks, hyperventilation and “Excedrin Migrane” pills until today, when nothing worked and the pain was my companion for two hours at work, pounding my head really bad. The problem with my work is that I use computers, microscopes and stereoscopes, all of them with focalized light, which doesn´t help…
Since I was consulting an osteopath for a knee injury, I went ahead and asked him about what his specialty had to offer to treat CH patients. He prescribed me with a lot of Magnesium, Vitamine C and B Complex, but so far that hasn´t helped at all and now I have a headache and a stomach pain, oh well, I had to try though.
As I mentioned before, oxygen has worked wonderfully for me at the hospital (ER) in the past, when I weak up at night with a CH episode, but here in Colombia, oxygen for domestic use is not easy to get. I´ve been reading about the nasal spray Imitrex, kindly mentioned by Mike NZ some time ago. IU haven´t been able to find an equivalent here but there is a spray with Zolmitriptan (I guess in other parts of the world is known as Zomig) that I found and I will be trying during my next CH episode that I guess is starting again right now…
Regards,
Tomas

Hi Jibran, thanks for the good advises. I´ll check out the D3 regime. The zomig equivalent that I tried seemed to work, although after two strong headaches today I feel sort of dumbed...or maybe is a side effect of the zomig? Regards.

Tomas wrote on Jul 15^th, 2016 at 11:16am:


Some people have been using welding oxygen when they haven't been able to get access to medical oxygen.