It stops you in your tracks and keeps you in bed. You'll do anything to stop that pain .
Twelve million people suffer from daily life-disrupting migraines, but taking too many pills can do more harm than good.
Vera Laubacher didn't know where to turn.
"I would have probably three bad weeks out of a month, " she said.
As a result, she stopped exercising, even eating. Vera was already taking high doses of prescription drugs, along with aspirin, Aleve and Advil.
"They would go away for two hours and come back. So I would take more and more," she said.
It turns out that all that medicine was causing more headaches. Dr. Deborah Tepper of the Cleveland Clinic sees a lot of patients with the same complaint.
"By far the most common reason patients come to here with daily headache, or near daily headache, is medication overuse," she said.
Doctors diagnosed Vera with MOH: Medication Overuse Headache. Dr Tepper says there's a simple way to tell if you're at risk.
"If you're acutely treating a headache more than 10 days per month, there is a high likelihood that there is medication overuse."
The use of powerful pain-killers like opioids or butalbital are red flags for MOH. Treatment often means being weaned off of painkillers completely. That's what Vera did.
"I don't take aspirin, I don't take Tylenol, I don't take any of that stuff. We threw away the Imitrex," she said.
Research shows it takes two to six months for the brain to recover from medication over-use. Vera is proof: No pills and no daily headache. She knows that less is truly more.
Experts say cutting off all medications won't fully cure patients of their acute migraines, but it will help reduce both the frequency and severity of the pain.
Patients who have frequent headaches or migraine attacks should consider preventive medications instead of taking more and more painkillers.
