Headache is commonly the result of food or chemical susceptibility. A large proportion of head pains, including even the worst forms of migraine, are simply due to allergic reactions. There is no need for a person to suffer for years on end with persistent headaches when the cause of these disorders can often be identified and relieved by eliminating certain common substances from the environment.
The idea that specific foods could cause headache is not new. As early as 1905, the Australian medical pioneer, Dr. Francis Hare, reported that head pain could be the result of eating incompatible foods.1 This observation was not pursued at the time by the medical profession. In 1927, two prominent American allergists, Drs. Albert G. Rowe and Warren T. Vaughan, both published articles implicating specific foods as the cause of allergic headaches.2-3
My own first medical paper, published in August, 1935, dealt with the subject of “Allergy in Migraine-like Headaches.”4 In it, Dr. John M. Sheldon and I, both then associated with the University of Michigan Medical School, observed that two-thirds of the migraine patients at the University Hospital in Ann Arbor obtained relief of their headaches by eliminating various foods from their diet.
These results were certainly better than those achieved by conventional medicine. Today, however, even better results can be achieved through the diagnosis of chemical susceptibility and of some common food allergies, which had not then been identified.
Allergic headaches do not discriminate in the site they attack. Every conceivable kind of headache—bilateral, frontal, as well as those radiating into the nape of the neck or the jaws—has been identified and controlled on the basis of clinical ecology. Since certain physicians have promoted alleged “antiheadache diets,” it is important to emphasize again that there is no mass-applicable shortcut to controlling such painful syndromes. What affects one patient does not trouble the next. There is simply no substitute for working out one’s own food allergy picture, using the methods explained later in this book.
A patient is rarely aware of the environmental source of his illness. He may see no relation between eating and headache, since the effects can be delayed. Or he may know that his headache is somehow related to his food intake, but that intake is so complex and varied that uncovering the actual source may seem like an impossibility. Or he may know that a particular food relieves his headache pain, not realizing that it may also cause it and that the “relief” meal is nothing but his maintenance dose.
The physical manner in which allergies cause headache is not entirely known, nor is this information crucial to either patient or physician. One possible explanation is that allergic reactions often cause water retention, or edema. When bellies or ankles become bloated, this is discomforting and disfiguring. But when the brain swells, it pushes against the inflexible skull, and pain results.
This theory receives support from the observations of Dr. Bernard S. Zussman, of Memphis, Tennessee, who had an allergic patient with a hole in his skull from an earlier brain operation. Whenever this patient ate a food to which he was allergic, his brain would literally swell and expand slightly out of the hole. Perhaps patients who speak of feeling “soggy” or “water-logged” in their heads are being more scientifically accurate than they imagine.
*68\110\2*
