EDITORIAL

HEADACHES?? SAY NO MORE!

Have you ever stopped to wonder what happened before the advance of Medicine? What did people do when they have common ailment like cold, catarrh or even headache?

Humans did not at first regard death and disease as natural phenomena. Common maladies such as colds or constipation, were accepted as part of existence and dealt with by means of such herbal remedies as were available. Serious and disabling diseases, however, were placed in a very different category. These were of supernatural origin. They might be the result of a spell cast upon the victim by some enemy, visitation by a malevolent demon, or the work of an offended god who had either projected some object-a dart, a stone, a worm-into the body of the victim or had abstracted something, usually the soul of the patient. The treatment then applied was to lure the errant soul back to its proper habitat within the body or to extract the evil intruder, be it dart or demon, by counter-spells, incantations, potions, suction, or other means.

Since the late nineteenth century, analgesic drugs have been available to the masses to alleviate general pain, including that caused by headaches (paracetamol, aspirin, Panadol) etc.

Before these drugs were available, how was headache treated? let me take you back in time;

1. TREPANNING

Ah, the age-old act of trepanning: so popular that it achieved a resurgence as a headache treatment 2500 years after it first appeared. The cavemen around in the 8th century BC put holes in their skulls to alleviate pressure on the brain (without a care for the damage they were doing to their bodies). Trepanation may have been performed to release demons and evil spirits from the head. Ancient man believed these spirits were the cause of headaches and disorders such as madness and epilepsy. The treatment never properly went away, but it did fall out of fashion. So when next someone tells you, you have a hole in your head, it's not really an insult

2. BURN YOUR HEAD! NOT HAIR O, HEAD! as in Ori!

Naturally, if your brain feels like it might explode out of your skull, the thing to do is add more fire. That’s what Arateus of Cappadocia, an ancient Greek physician, recommended. Hilariously, Arateus notes that his suggestions might just be “hazardous treatments”:  "wow!, Who could've thought it would be?!"

3. RUN A WARM, SWEET BATH

 Immerse yourself in a bath of warm, sweetened water (honey was best), which acts to draw out the vapours that bring aches to one’s head. Truthfully, it’s not terrible advice-plenty of people after a hard day, possibly feeling fuzzy in the head, will run a bath and soak in it for several hours.

4.ADD SOME EELS TO THE BATH

Electricity and the brain do not mix all that well, truth be told. Yet for centuries now, electricity and the brain have been mixed through medicine. (Electroshock treatment is just one example.)

When a slave complains of a bad headache, he has them put one of their hands on their head and the other on the fish, and they thereby will be helped immediately, without exception.

And if eel is not available, we fit run am with live wire, abi wetin you think?

5.  PLACE GARLIC INSIDE THE SKULL. Vampire alert!!

If you want a qualified surgeon, Abulcasis was regarded as the best of his time. He resided in Cordoba, Spain, in the 10th century and was the physician to the Spanish caliph, effectively marking him out as the most prominent medical mind of the period. His ideas about migraine, though, may make you regard him with slight concern. He had two main ideas about what to do in cases of severe headache: put hot pokers on the head, and perform a surgical procedure involving cloves of garlic. The best thing about this set of ideas is that the hot poker was meant to be the milder remedy. The garlic came if that didn't work (and remember, they were operating in an age without anesthesia): the eminent surgeon would make incisions in the temples of the afflicted person and put pieces of garlic inside them. At least the garlic was peeled first?

Which one of this would you be trying? Life is after all, an adventure.