La Migraine, Biographie D'Une Maladie

Migraines seem trivial because they affect only 10 to 12% of adults and 3 to 10% of children. However, a large portion of migraine sufferers (over 50%, according to certain studies) are unaware of their condition since they refuse to acknowledge their pain and are unable to identify it. Why then, when there are so many care units and learned societies devoted to migraine treatment, is it so difficult to admit that we are having migraines?This book examines the historical reasons why the status of migraine patients is so elusive. Although migraine complaints seem to have existed at least since antiquity (as early as the 2nd century AD there was a term for “migraine sufferers”), “migraine” is a relatively recent term which has not always been thought of as an illness in its own right. Doctors and patients alike have sometimes concurred in treating it as anecdotal and insignificant. Yet if migraines are nothing but inconsequential medical events, how can we explain the countless explanatory models and therapies, or the vast numbers of iconographic studies, which they have produced?It is the account of this paradox between an illness whose name is not officially recognised, seems invisible (what signs could objectively assure a husband that his wife is not fooling him at night when she says that she has a migraine?), and has inspired so many names to describe it, so many images to portray it, that readers will discover in this study which, through historic personal testimony, seeks to achieve a better understanding of the lives of migraine sufferers.