Speaker 1: Flex and Frooms Flex and Frooms. This is the Flex
Speaker 1: and Frooms catch up podcast.
Speaker 2: You're back with Flexi and Throum and Flexi. A few
Speaker 2: weeks ago, I was talking to you about my migraines.
Speaker 1: Yes, quite a touchy topic.
Speaker 3: Some would say I didn't know until then, and I
Speaker 3: do apologize. I was like a migraine down players getting headaches. No,
Speaker 3: they're not headaches.
Speaker 2: A migraine denier, MiG well Abridge A Brookie has gone
Speaker 2: ahead and found procured an experts, an expert. His name
Speaker 2: is Carl Cincinnato and he is a migraine expert. He's
Speaker 2: actually the director of operations at Migraine and Headache Australia,
Speaker 2: which I think is very important having an institute for
Speaker 2: US migraine girlies.
Speaker 1: He and Pam Padami Davems.
Speaker 3: Brought a migraine community.
Speaker 2: He's lived in migraines for thirty years. We're just going
Speaker 2: to jump straight into the chat.
Speaker 1: Here is Carl. Hello, Hey, Carl, such a pleasure.
Speaker 2: Now. I'm just reading through this sheet and it says
Speaker 2: you're the operations director at Migraine and Headache Australia and
Speaker 2: you've lived with migraines for thirty years, so I think
Speaker 2: you're a good person to tell us. What is the
Speaker 2: difference between migraines and headaches.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot of differences between it.
Speaker 4: A lot of people think that migraine is actually just
Speaker 4: a bad headache. We've all heard of migraine, and it's
Speaker 4: used sometimes as an excuse, usually by those that don't
Speaker 4: have migraine to get out of things. But there's a
Speaker 4: lot of things that are quite different. So if you
Speaker 4: look at a typical tension headache, which is what ninety
Speaker 4: percent of the population has experienced, those are usually mild
Speaker 4: to moderate. With a migraine, the head pain is actually
Speaker 4: moderate to severe, and it could be so severe that
Speaker 4: can cause nausea, vomiting, sensitivity to light, sound, and movement,
Speaker 4: And in fact, those things are so common that it's
Speaker 4: actually used to diagnose migraine. So if you have regular
Speaker 4: headache that cause light sensitivity or nausea, or that are
Speaker 4: interrupting your activities on a relatively frequent basis, then there's
Speaker 4: something like a ninety percent probability that's actually migraine. You
Speaker 4: do need to go to get diagnosed, but there's a
Speaker 4: lot of people in a show out. At least half
Speaker 4: the population that have migraine that haven't even been diagnosed yet,
Speaker 4: I think they have another condition. But to talk about
Speaker 4: some of the key differences, attention headache will sort of
Speaker 4: come and go. It may last twenty minutes to a
Speaker 4: couple of hours. Migraine will last four to seventy two
Speaker 4: hours if not treated. And attention headache is kind of
Speaker 4: just there and then it's not. It kind of self resolves.
Speaker 4: Migraine actually has four phases to it. There's a prodrome,
Speaker 4: there's an aura, there's the migraine head pain itself, and
Speaker 4: then there's a post rome. And I'm happy to talk
Speaker 4: more about those as well.
Speaker 2: If you like, Yes, can you give us like a
Speaker 2: rundown of let's use one of your migraines for example,
Speaker 2: Can you talk us through what that looks like over
Speaker 2: a day or however long it.
Speaker 1: Happens to you.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So there's different subtypes of migraine. I have a
Speaker 4: subtype of migrine called migraine with aura, or sometimes known
Speaker 4: as classical migraine.
Speaker 3: One of my communitys like traditional appearance, the original Sorry, yeah, but.
Speaker 4: You don't want it, I mean, you don't want any
Speaker 4: type of migraine, but classical migraine or marine with aura
Speaker 4: involves something like it's called a visual aura, and it's
Speaker 4: it affects people in different ways. About thirty percent of
Speaker 4: people with migraine experiences, but typically what happens is I
Speaker 4: have a visual disruptance, and for me, it's a they
Speaker 4: call it a skintulating scotoma. It's basically a shimmering of
Speaker 4: light or zigzag lines that start in the peripheral vision
Speaker 4: and move into your central vision in sort of one eye,
Speaker 4: and it's actually a brain phenomenon. It's not actually caused
Speaker 4: by the eyes. So when you close your eyes, you
Speaker 4: actually still see the zigzag lines and it's kind of
Speaker 4: like looking after the sun, and then you kind of
Speaker 4: get that blurriness or that sort of visual sort of impairment,
Speaker 4: and then when you look away, you kind of can't
Speaker 4: quite focus or see anything just yet. It's like that,
Speaker 4: but it can last between twenty and forty minutes, and
Speaker 4: that's kind of the second phase of the migraine for me.
Speaker 4: The first phase that is called prodrome, and that can
Speaker 4: involve things like just strange kind of sensory things like
Speaker 4: pins and needles, in the lips and nose or fingertips
Speaker 4: like kind of in extremities, it can evolve sort of
Speaker 4: tired in a successive yawning. Even exceptive urination has been
Speaker 4: reported in this phase of migraine. And that phase can
Speaker 4: kind of happen twenty four hours before the actual attack itself,
Speaker 4: so very very different sootypical tension headache that we might experience,
Speaker 4: and then you have the aura, and then after the
Speaker 4: aura follows the head pain, and that can be sort
Speaker 4: of moderate to severe and can be very debilitating for
Speaker 4: a lot of people, particularly when you have sort of
Speaker 4: light sensitivity and sensitive to sound and movement. There's not
Speaker 4: a lot you can really do. It's extremely difficult to function.
Speaker 4: And then in the final phase of a migraine attack,
Speaker 4: it's called the post rome, and that's where experiences very
Speaker 4: greatly again within the population of people that have migraine.
Speaker 4: Some people feel just completely washed out, like you've just
Speaker 4: been beaten up or hit by a truck. Other people
Speaker 4: feel this sense of elation, like they feel really good
Speaker 4: and it's like they've got a new leaf of life.
Speaker 4: They feel better, the pain's gone, and they're full of
Speaker 4: energy and ready to get back into things. So it's
Speaker 4: a very individual experience, but again a very different one.
Speaker 3: The headache truly sounds terrifying, and I don't know why
Speaker 3: we're not telling the real tales of migraine. When Brooke
Speaker 3: out producer and Frough described to me, it's flex here
Speaker 3: what the migraines were like, I said, how are you
Speaker 3: living like this day to day? Especially in an environment
Speaker 3: of people like, oh, you'll be fine, just take some
Speaker 3: insert pharmaceutical.
Speaker 1: Treat here.
Speaker 3: But I wanted to know. I've never had a migraine before.
Speaker 3: And if we're going to be candid, and I will
Speaker 3: be candid with you, KRL, I live quite an unhealthy lifestyle.
Speaker 3: Rarely drink water, preservative base, if there's sugar in it,
Speaker 3: I will consume it. And yet migraines like I don't
Speaker 3: get them.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: I don't know if there's a correlation, But do you
Speaker 3: know why some people get migraines and some don't, or
Speaker 3: will I eventually evolve into being a migraine sufferer.
Speaker 4: It's a great question. So there's two kinds of reasons
Speaker 4: why people get migraines. Two big reasons. One is called
Speaker 4: it's from genetics, right, So if you have a family
Speaker 4: history of it, if you have a certain combination of genes.
Speaker 4: There's no one gene that we've found that causes migraine
Speaker 4: and absolutely everyone there is if you have hemaplegic migraine,
Speaker 4: which is a severe form of migraine, But there's not
Speaker 4: one gene that. There's an association of different genes and
Speaker 4: they can play a role, and scientists think that that's
Speaker 4: about fifty percent of the cause. The other fifty percent
Speaker 4: is are these factors called our environmental factors. So we
Speaker 4: know that if you've had multiple concussions like head injuries,
Speaker 4: have you've been in a car accident where you had
Speaker 4: whiplash or even a concussion in that incident, If you'd
Speaker 4: have any form of childhood abuse, whether that's physical, emotional, sexual,
Speaker 4: or even sort of extremely difficult emotional periods like the
Speaker 4: death of an immediate family member at a critical point
Speaker 4: or at any point, or extremely stressful situation, those can
Speaker 4: all set it off. And those are what we call
Speaker 4: kind of the environmental factors, are things that happened to
Speaker 4: you whilst the thing not just inherited.
Speaker 2: Interesting, Yeah, the hemoplegic one is the one that I
Speaker 2: had as a kid, but it's somehow gone away as
Speaker 2: I've gotten older. Do you see that with some migraine
Speaker 2: sufferers that when they hit a certain age, they disappear
Speaker 2: Like it's crazy to me to think that now I'm
Speaker 2: twenty four and they're gone.
Speaker 3: I want to change the term to migraine survivor if
Speaker 3: I could do that, I said suffer initially. I'm taking
Speaker 3: it back survivor.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And a lot of people call themselves worries, right
Speaker 4: because it really is like you're waging war against this,
Speaker 4: you know, this beast, and it happens on two main fronts.
Speaker 4: One is the pain itself and the disruption, and that's awful,
Speaker 4: and that in itself is really tough. But for people
Speaker 4: that have chronic migraine, and chronic migraine is defined it's
Speaker 4: fifteen days or more out of the month, so more
Speaker 4: than half your life with migraine is it is brutal
Speaker 4: and incredibly difficult, and that takes its all psychologically. It
Speaker 4: affects people's mental health. We know the people that have
Speaker 4: frequent migraine are four to six times more likely to
Speaker 4: have a mental health issue like depression or anxiety. So
Speaker 4: it really is you know, for people that are migrine
Speaker 4: survivors or warriors, like they really are bubtling and they
Speaker 4: really have thought to get to you know, to get
Speaker 4: to where they are.
Speaker 1: Yeah, damn. All right, Well, thank you, Kyl.
Speaker 2: That's a nice summation of migraines right there for anyone listening.
Speaker 2: If you're like me and you hear about migraines in
Speaker 2: your mouth starts watering because they're so disgusting. I apologize
Speaker 2: for this broadcast, really appreciate your time.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Kyl, Thanks for having me. See you later.
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