Posted by Victor (24.240.212.38) on December 13, 2001 at 09:59:20:
In Reply to: Victor - that's interesting what you say about histaminic posted by Jim R on December 13, 2001 at 07:10:44:
you can take for a CH, even antihistamine tablets as it dries out the mucus membranes and can make a CH worse if that is possible. The with prolonged use, you can get rebound, for normal people this would be running around with a plugged up nose, for CH sufferers, some really bad CH's to accompany that plugged nose.
These headaches at one time were called histaminic headaches or HH's until what's name changed them to clusters. Histaminic due to the fact the the nostril would plug up with histamamine.
At a moment of absolute despair with a terrible HH, coated my nose with Ora Jel and that knocked out a terrible headache in minutes. I have been using it ever since. Told my neuro about it, he doesn't think it will do any damage, but so far after seven years, no rebound, works everytime except when I had that bad sinus virus last year, needed lots of O2 with it, but it did ease the headaches to semi-bearable.
Interesting, in the horse days in large cities like Chicago, they will pile huge amounts of decaying horse menure every couple of blocks and many were aflicted with an eye piercing headache. Ha, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen sulfide gas emissions that are all membrane irritants. Could be a factor.
Ironically this disappeared for a long period then in the 70's we got the catalytic converter where the early ones were kicking out hydrogen sulfide gas, farmers switched from daily manure spreading to manure pits where you would get high concenstrations of hydrogen sulfide gas, power companies switched to high sulfur content coal due to the energy crisis another source of hydrogen sulfide gas, buildings had the amount of air exchanged and with a steam boiler even burning natural gas, the concenstrations of hydrogen sulfide gas would increase.
Could be just a coincidence, but I started gettings CH's or HH's at the same period of time.
As concentrations would vary significantly with the weather conditions, ironically moist humid air is lighter than dry air so the concentrations would be heavier than a clear dry day, these headaches would come in clusters.
Could be just a coincidence, but I find by avoiding these areas, my CH's decrease significantly in both frequency and intensity. Irritated mucus membranes tend to swell up and plug the nasil passages as an onset to that dreaded cluster.