[jsherer]

Back in August of 2021 I started tracking my headaches. I was experiencing 10+ debilitating migraines a month and had modified a number of variables in effort to reduce them (sleep, stress, water/caffeine intake, etc).

In September I got a blood panel from my GP and noticed low levels of essential vitamins. In October, I had 12 migraines. I started supplements for B12, Vitamin D, Vitamin K, etc. The migraines decreased each month: in November to 9, then 3, then 1. In February I had my first migraine free month in years.

Neurology is complicated. Migraines/headaches can be caused by a variety of factors. I chose to rule out things in my control (diet, exercise, stress, sleep, and finally vitamins) before taking daily use migraine medicine.

[candiddevmike]

I've experienced the vitamin thing too, even when taking a multivitamin. Turns out that I don't absorb vitamins in a pill very well, switching to chewables and chewing the hell out of them has eliminated a ton of weird physical/mental things for me.

[disabled]

You can crush the tablets with a mortar and pestle, which you can buy online. A mortar and pestle is very cheap and is basic lab equipment. Alternatively you can use a pill crusher which is available in pharmacies.

You can buy empty capsules (gelatin/vegan/flavored/etc.) online or at a local vitamin/supplement store. They are in standardized sizes like 0 or 00 or something similar.

You can fill the capsules with the crushed tablet material using something called a “pill machine” (search for it online). The pill machine that you buy needs to match the size of your capsules. So if you buy 0 sized capsules, you need to buy a capsule machine that uses size 0 capsules.

[eurasiantiger]

Multivitamins are often sort of a scam: they contain cheap versions of vitamins that are not directly bioavailable, and essential minerals that are in a non-water-soluble form. All this leads to poor bioavailability.

In addition, some vitamin forms are actively harmful, such as the very common vitamin B12 form, cyanocobalamin, which releases cyanide as it becomes bioavailable. Better B12 forms such as methylcobalamin can be demethylated enzymatically and the free cobalamin is then able to bind to free cyanide (or other toxins) and remove them from the body.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

Have you considered capsules instead? Chewables typically have very few active ingredients, rather being almost all gelatin and sugar.

[candiddevmike]

No, can you recommend some?

[ThePowerOfFuet]

Two-Per-Day Capsules from Life Extension, either directly from their site or resold via Amazon. It's everything you should need, in a capsule form which should have no problem coming apart in your stomach. It's around $15 a month.

If you want the ultimate, look at Life Extension Mix, which is 9 big tablets or 14 capsules per day because there's so much stuff in it, but this is overkill for most people (and at something like $50 a month it is not cheap).

[crossroadsguy]

Same here. D and B12 were drastically low. Though mine were not migraines really, but close. Occipital nerve pain. Supplements (B12, D) and neck exercises, and heat fomenting have been of tremendous help. Touchwood!

[Covzire]

I get really bad migraines when I fast sometimes, a random youtube video I came across suggested it might be from a mineral deficiency and suggested taking some Himalayan salt and to my surprise it works really well for me, knocks out my migraine within an hour every time.

[kshacker]

Good to see your comment. I have been having this issue and worth trying your solution.

[FerociousTimes]

What about the month of March? Symptom-free too?

Not to take away from your great efforts to solve this problem but you controlled for a few key variables in your experiment but not for the placebo effect which is one of the most important factors to rule out in such experiments.

[jsherer]

Good question. Indeed, I prioritized improving my vitamin levels for health reasons, including the possibility that it may reduce my headaches, rather than running a purely scientific experiment. If the migraines come back while I maintain normal vitamin levels, I'll continue my experimentation!

March: 0

April: 0

[anikan_vader]

Why would you want to rule out the placebo effect? If the placebo effect eliminates your pain, that's fantastic!

[FerociousTimes]

What I meant is that you can't say with absolute confidence that supplementing for vitamins cured his migraine without accounting for the placebo effect in that experiment.

[jfengel]

It's not a valid experiment regardless. There are too many confounding factors and too small a group.

It doesn't matter. Medicine is a lot less about proper science than we'd like to believe. It's about helping people feel better. Science is a crucial tool for that, but it doesn't always work, while random guessing sometimes does. Even the science is often supplemented with random guessing.

Eventually, you take enough random-guesses-that-worked and apply science to it. That gives you a lot more confidence to recommend it to other people. But often, confidence is all you get, rarely certainty.

[FerociousTimes]

Yeah, you're definitely right; I should have added in the end "among many other factors".

While I admit that n is pretty small indeed and thus doesn't qualify for a proper and rigorous clinical experiment, the reason I mentioned the placebo effect in particular is because of the fact that some symptoms or diseases have some psychosomatic streak to them, if you will, and therefore the role of the placebo effect in these cases becomes more pronounced to research and investigate but if the OP felt way better after the treatment, that's what it all counts like you said.

It was no nitpicking or mischief on my part raising this issue :)

[snarf21]

Well said. We do so much damage to our own bodies and environments. This compound each other in unknown ways. But it is hard and takes specific effort to correct.