The Headache - by Tom Zeller Jr (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

"Required reading for anyone with a head."--Mary Roach, New York Times bestselling author of Stiff and Fuzz

For the many millions of headache sufferers, 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 headache disorders 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 is--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.

Review Quotes

"For a condition that affects 50 million Americans, migraine is surprisingly poorly understood and, as a research topic, grievously underfunded. By turns personal (cluster headache! God almighty!) and journalistic, The Headache explores the mysterious nature of headache pain and, equally mysterious, the whims of federal funding and the biases that underlie the condition's neglect. Zeller writes with intelligence, compassion, equanimity, and wit. Required reading for anyone with a head."
-- Mary Roach, New York Times bestselling author of Stiff and Fuzz

"The Headache is smart, insightful, funny, compassionate, addictively readable, and most of all necessary. It's about time--and every sufferer out there will agree--that we try to make sense of headaches, one of medicine's longstanding great mysteries. Tom Zeller Jr.'s book is a pioneering illumination of both the subject and the many people it touches, offering understanding tinged with hope." -- Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Poisoner's Handbook

"An important, harrowing, and ultimately hopeful book. If the path to enlightenment is to make the darkness conscious, as Carl Jung taught, then Tom Zeller Jr. is showing us the way by illuminating his own pain and those of countless others suffering from devastating headaches. The science here is skillfully explained, of course, but that's only the most obvious of this book's many virtues." -- Dan Fagin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Toms River

"The Headache not only renders the monstrous dimensions of Zeller's own headache pain, it traces the haphazard and often comically dismissive attempts by science to make sense of headache disorders writ large. In turns wry, curious, and even harrowing, the book's quest for a Sanctuary of Asclepius ultimately broadens our understanding of a remarkably understudied plague -- and the new strains of science that appear to be, at long last, developing on the frontier. The Headache is an odyssey and a revelation." -- Charles M. Blow, author of Fire Shut Up In My Bones and The Devil You Know

"In this absorbing, incisive account of the history of headache disorders, Zeller captures the profound human and scientific costs of medicine's neglect of these common conditions that affect millions of people--especially women--and points the way toward a more hopeful future." -- Maya Dusenbery, author of Doing Harm