The Headache

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For the many millions of headache sufferers and fans of Mary Roach, Siddartha Mukerjee, and Ed Yong, a deeply reported, sometimes harrowing, and frequently humorous journey into the authors own excruciating headaches, and the science behind these surprisingly mysterious disorders that may, finally, offer relief.

Virtually everyone has experienced a headachea nuisance arising from occasional stress or as payback for last nights overindulgence. But for hundreds of millions of people, there are headaches, and then there are headaches. From blinding migraines to severe headaches known as clusters, chronic head pain can upend entire seasons of life. And perhaps owing to the ordinariness of the very word headache, these disorders are frequently trivialized.

In The Headache, veteran science journalist Tom Zeller Jr. takes readers on an odyssey both intimate and panoramic, through his own decades-long struggle with cluster headaches and across the scientific landscape of a group of disorders that areto the chagrin of sufferersas much a curse as a cultural punchline. He visits cutting-edge clinics; interviews dozens of doctors, neurologists, and fellow headache patients; participates in clinical trials for multi-million-dollar new medicines; and even experiments with psilocybin in search of relief. Along the way, Zeller traces the longer arc of mystery around headaches, from prehistoric skull surgery to Virginia Woolfs assertion that, in the throes of a migraine, language runs dry, to reveal how headaches became one of the most under-researched afflictions in medicineand how that is slowly starting to change.

With warmth, wit, and infectious curiosity, Zellers search for the origins of his own headaches becomes a journey into the inner workings of the human nervous system, and an illuminating look at the nature of pain itself.