It's been a pretty darn good few months for proponents of medicinal, well, insert your drug of choice here. With the news that medicinal marijuana growing by leaps and bounds in the US, recent reports that MDMA may help treat sufferers of severe psychological trauma, along with report stating that MDMA could be a prescription drug by 2021, and a study that determined that psychedelics may improve mental health, comes more good news: psychedelics may be ablet to help treat cluster headaches, some of the most intensely painful headaches people can get. In fact, some sufferers actually commit suicide to escape the unbearable pain.
Artist's rendition of a cluster headache.
According to Brian E. McGeeney, MD, MPH, a neurologist and Assistant Professor of Neurology at Boston University School of Medicine, cluster headaches are a “disorder that destroys people emotionally. The use of hallucinogens gives them a break, which they wouldn’t otherwise get. Many feel ignored or let down by the medical community. Physicians lose interest in them as treatments don’t work. The use of [psychedelics] is a last resort.”
Cluster headaches can be likened to “an icepick piercing your brain through your eyes,” and can last for up to 90 minutes, at times debilitating patients so intensely that they can't function normally in society - and there's no known cure. In fact, the suicide rate is 20 times higher than the national average for cluster headache patients, according to a report published by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a 501(c)(3) non-profit research and educational organisation dedicated to expanding the usages of psychedelics and marijuana.
Luckily, help could be on the way. Upon hearing stories from ClusterBusters, a non profit organisation that specialises in finding cures for cluster headaches, reports of patients who, took LSD and saw their symptoms regress, Dr. John Halpern, MD, is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School suggested looking into non-hallucinogenic 2-Bromo-LSD, instead of LSD, because although it’s similar in chemical structure to LSD, a huge bromine atom prevents receptors in the brain from picking up the hallucinogenic properties of the drug. And it worked.
“One patient had cluster headaches for 27 years. He had debilitating 3-month long cycles, and wasn’t responding to meds. He was devastated. He was getting 40 cluster headaches a week.” After his treatment, he had zero headaches for 17 months," Dr. Halpern said.
This might not just be good news for cluster patients, Halpern thinks. “This drug [2-Bromo-LSD] could be a blockbuster, just for cluster headache, but what if it turns out it’s good for migraines too?” Maybe one day soon, psychedelics will render headaches a thing of the past.