A Cure for Chronic Headaches?

Aug. 9, 2007 — -- Millions of people experience headaches every year, but for some of those people, the pains are more frequent and disruptive than average.

Lori Shinol was one of those people — a chronic headache sufferer.

"Eight out of 10 days it would be a pressure and a pain at the back," she said.

Shinol was desperate to regain control of her life, and tried various pain medications. Even acupuncture didn't diminish her pain.

"I would just feel so bad, and I would go crawl in a hole, crawl in bed somewhere and retreat," Shinol said. "I had learned to live with it."

Shinol stopped seeing friends, and her days were spent inside. In turn, her family suffered.

"She didn't participate with the boys and I as much," said her husband John Shinol. "She kind of almost backed away from our lives a little bit. It was almost like a void."

Jevin Luchsinger also had similar experiences to Shinol's.

"Sometimes, it's a pounding when it gets really bad, but it's mostly like a pressure, like my head is just going to expand and explode or something," the 16-year-old said.

His headaches forced him to be homebound during his sophomore year in high school.

As chronic headache sufferers, Luchsinger and Shinol get headaches at least 15 days out of a month. The standard treatment is medication, but they opted for a new alternative.

Dr. Pamela Blake, of Memorial Hermann Northwest Hospital in Houston, has pioneered a new minimally invasive surgery for patients with chronic daily headaches. She said that usually, the headaches aren't migraines or tension headaches, but, rather, an irritation of one or more of the nerves that emanate from the back of the skull.

Find out more about the procedure at www.migraineheadachesurgery.com.

"It's kind of like a pinched nerve you might have in your neck or back, and the pain radiates down your arm or down your leg," she said. "In this case, the nerve gets pinched in the musculature of your neck, and the pain radiates along the distribution of the nerve, which is up into the head or down into the neck."

For her procedure, Blake carefully chooses patients who might respond, and then pairs up with a plastic surgeon who performs the surgery, called nerve decompression.