This disease is characterized by severe headache, usually one-sided or unilateral. Often it is associated with a deranged condition of the vision. The eye affection, however, is only one symptom of the symptom complex.

Etiology

It is said this disease is hereditary. It is no more hereditary than any other nervous affection. People who are born with a nervous diathesis may have a preponderating tendency to take on migraines, or the tendency may run in some other direction. Any of the different types of nerve derangements is liable to develop in those of neurotic temperament, but it is as impossible to inherit a headache as to inherit any other disease. Women are more inclined to this disease than men. However, both sexes do develop it. It is a house disease, brought on and kept in existence by imprudence in eating. I have seen cases of twenty years' standing cured so quickly that they did not have more than one headache after the treatment was begun. And invariably the cure was made by correcting the habits of living, especially the diet.

Symptoms

Patients usually can tell when an attack is coming on. Some can tell two or three days ahead that they are going to have an attack. Such cases need never develop a headache; for as soon as they are put on the proper treatment the headache will cease, never to return. The fact of the matter is that these headaches are produced by coffee, tea, alcoholics, tobacco, continual eating of an excess of starch, badly combined food, or not enough fresh fruits and vegetables. Constipation will produce them. Indeed, with a neurotic temperament, anything that uses up nerve energy and brings on enervation, with fermentation of starches in the stomach and bowels, is liable to develop this disease.

Treatment

It is so easy that we wonder patients do not learn to know what it is that causes them to be sick, and then correct the errors of life that lead to it. Those who are in the habit of taking tea, coffee, alcohol, or of living in a house where tobacco smoke is settling on the hangings or furnishings of the room, causing an ill-smelling odor continually, must get rid of all these things; for they depres's and enervate. If patients use up their nerve energy entertaining and being entertained, this, too, must stop. Everything that causes enervation must be discontinued. Early to bed and early to rise should be the motto; and then exceedingly plain food, three times a day, at regular intervals, should be the dietetic rule. Those carrying considerable flesh should be kept on a fruit diet until brought down to a normal weight.