How Did Botox and Surgery Become Treatments for Migraine?
In the course of treating wrinkles, muscle spasm after stroke, and other various problems, physicians began to note a surprising extra benefit of the drug: Some patients whose brows were injected for wrinkles noted that their headaches, often of many years’ duration, had cleared spontaneously. Any good scientist knows that many health problems and outcomes are simply coincidental: they both may occur, but aren’t related. However, the numbers of patients with forehead wrinkles who reported headache improvement began to increase, and the possibility became clearer: Perhaps weakening a few specific muscles containing branches of the nerve system registering pain in all parts of the head (the Trigeminal, or Fifth Cranial Nerve) somehow stabilized that system and caused it to quit signaling pain. In its simplest terms, decompressing these nerve branches by paralyzing muscles that were irritating them might be comparable to temporarily removing a slipped disc that was causing compression of
