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Comment by sixQuarks | Hacker News Reader

If you suffer migraines and you drink coffee, STOP drinking coffee immediately. Even if you've been drinking coffee forever with no migraines until recently, trust me, stop the coffee.

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I've had migraines for 10 years. I would guess about 1 per week/fortnight on average, lasting for 8ish hours. Never drank coffee until this year, when I started drinking it along with a high dose of aspirin (~1000mg) when I felt a migraine coming on. Almost a complete cure for me, much better than the medicine my doctor prescribed for me. So, for anyone else reading, like everything with migraines, your mileage may vary.

That sounds similar to Excedrin Migraine (which also adds acetaminophen and ibuprofen).

Yeah I’ve heard about that, but I haven’t been able to find it in Canada. I’ve tried a combination aspirin + caffeine pill, but it didn’t seem to work as well as coffee.

This is a bit odd considering Excedrin (OTC migraine product; not especially great compared to the prescription ones, but it's easier to get) contains caffeine as one of the ingredients. It seems like you're speaking from anecdotal experience rather than any sort of scientific study? If that's not true, can you provide some evidence for your recommendation?

Anecdotally (and I was under the impression that this was more widely known), caffeine can both cause migraines and give relief from them. Kind of a “hair of the dog” effect.

So as a general recommendation, "if you haven't already, try eliminating caffeine and see if it helps you?" That is probably more useful than "eliminate coffee, trust me."

Yes, that's the recommendation I would give. I personally don't think that eliminating my 1cup/day of coffee has a major effect on my migraines (based on my long history), but I would expect it to be almost curative for some others.

My experience is that caffeine helps me against migraine. Do you take caffeine from some other source ?

I switched to ginseng primarily. Green tea some but not much and not daily. I cut out coffee for 3 weeks for another reason and the migraines went away.

They come back with stress, not enough breaks from mobile/monitors, and other unknowns.

Exercise daily getting your heart rate up has helped also.

There’s a migraine book out there about the exclusion diet where you slowly cut things out and make detailed logs. Log what you eat, what you did, felt, a super detailed journal. I never make it more than a few days of that.

The caffeine thing is very confusing-there is plenty of advice that says caffeine helps a headache or migraine and the opposite says it is bad.

Caffeine can have both effects. Long-term use triggers it. Short-term use helps.

Speaking out of personal and family experience.

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