The Headache: The Science of a Most Confounding Affliction?and a Search for Relief: Chronic Head Pain, the Mystery of Its Origins, and the Search for Effective Relief

Zeller Jr., Tom

ISBN 10: 0358507758 / ISBN 13: 9780358507758

Editore: Mariner Books, 2025

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Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: The Headache: The Science of a Most Confounding Affliction?and a Search for Relief: Chronic Head Pain, the Mystery of Its Origins, and the Search for Effective Relief
• Editore: Mariner Books
• Data di pubblicazione: 2025
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0358507758
• ISBN 13: 9780358507758
• Rilegatura: Rilegato
• Condizione: New

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

For the many millions of headache sufferers and fans of Mary Roach, Siddartha Mukerjee, and Ed Yong, a deeply reported, sometimes harrowing, and frequently humorous journey into the author’s own excruciating headaches, and the science behind these surprisingly mysterious disorders that may, finally, offer relief.

Virtually everyone has experienced a headache—a nuisance arising from occasional stress or as payback for last night’s overindulgence. But for hundreds of millions of people, there are headaches, and then there are headaches. From blinding migraines to severe headaches known as “clusters,” chronic head pain can upend entire seasons of life. And perhaps owing to the ordinariness of the very word “headache,” these disorders are frequently trivialized.

In The Headache, veteran science journalist Tom Zeller Jr. takes readers on an odyssey both intimate and panoramic, through his own decades-long struggle with cluster headaches and across the scientific landscape of a group of disorders that are—to the chagrin of sufferers—as much a curse as a cultural punchline. He visits cutting-edge clinics; interviews dozens of doctors, neurologists, and fellow headache patients; participates in clinical trials for multi-million-dollar new medicines; and even experiments with psilocybin in search of relief.  Along the way, Zeller traces the longer arc of mystery around headaches, from prehistoric skull surgery to Virginia Woolf’s assertion that, in the throes of a migraine, “language runs dry,” to reveal how headaches became one of the most under-researched afflictions in medicine—and how that is slowly starting to change.

With warmth, wit, and infectious curiosity, Zeller’s search for the origins of his own headaches becomes a journey into the inner workings of the human nervous system, and an illuminating look at the nature of pain itself. 

Informazioni sull?autore

Tom Zeller Jr. is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Undark, a nonprofit digital magazine exploring the intersection of science and society. Previously, he was a reporter and columnist at the New York Times, an editor at large for National Geographic magazine, and a Knight Science Journalism fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He lives in Lolo, Montana. The Headache is his first book.