CASE STUDY: HEADACHE AND DEPRESSION

« THE BASIC CONCEPTS OF ALLERGIES: CASE STUDY: CHEMICAL SUSCEPTIBILITY

CASE STUDY: HEADACHE AND DEPRESSION

Sandra Casey was twenty-one years old when she entered the Ecology Unit. Her headaches centered around her eyes and forehead. They were steady in nature and accompanied by sensitivity to light. She had these headaches three

or four times a month, and each lasted for three or four days. While having a headache, she was unable to sleep or rest yet could take no medication, for medicine seemed to make her depressed.

Miss Casey had been diagnosed as having hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) several months before she came to the unit. She had been on a hypoglycemia diet which consisted of six small, high-protein meals a day. At first she felt much better on this diet, but eventually she became depressed and suicidal. (Doctors see many such cases of alleged hypoglycemia. The symptoms, including marked swings in blood-sugar levels after consumption of corn sugar, may frequently be the result of food allergies, not of true hypoglycemia, a point first noted by Dr. William A. Philpott of Oklahoma City.)

Another problem which Mrs. Casey had was what she called “attacks.” The first attack came after she took some hashish at the age of fifteen. She became very cold, and her limbs felt as if they were frozen all day. She thought she were going to die or go insane, yet a physician who examined her declared that there were no permanent effects from the drug.

Since that time, however, she had had frequent sensations of numbness, which would start in her back and radiate over her head. This feeling was quite difficult for her to explain; she said it was similar to having a bucket of cold water poured over one’s head. After the attack she became disoriented, depressed, and suicidal.

As stated, this patient’s symptoms ranged from localized physical reactions (minus-one) to more profound systemic changes. She complained of sore throat, phlegm in the back of her throat, chest pain, lightheadedness, and dizziness. Her abdominal bloating became so troublesome that she looked as if she were pregnant.

Because of her depression and suicidal tendencies, Sandra had been under the care of a psychiatrist and had been institutionalized for nineteen days. Antidepressive drugs made her even more suicidal. In fact, her suicidal thoughts were becoming obsessive, especially since her husband was a gun collector who kept arms within easy reach around the house.

She reported a craving for sugar and sweet foods in general and said she loved to go through a box of cookies at a single sitting. Not surprisingly, her strongest reactions in testing were to wheat, corn, peas, blueberries, beets and beet sugar, and other commonly eaten foods, taken singly according to the methods of the Ecology Unit. Commercial foods gave her a headache, cumulatively, after five meals.

She left the hospital headache-free and in a normal frame of mind. Her problem was diagnosed as multiple food and chemical susceptibility, and her chances of recovery were excellent, provided she followed the recommended procedures. Suffice it to say, in summary, that headaches demonstrated to be on an allergic basis may be of any descriptive type—that is, any location, any degree of severity, with or without usual symptoms, nausea, vomiting, or other features. Although allergic headaches are far more commonly demonstrated to be on the basis of reactions to given foods and/or environmental chemical exposures, they may also be related to such allergens as house dust, pollens, and sometimes drugs. Indeed, I have seen patients whose treatment with such pain-relieving drugs as codeine accentuates their headaches.

As mentioned earlier, allergic headaches were described over a half century ago. Under these circumstances, there is no excuse for patients to be told to “live” with their headaches. When headache patients are investigated by means of proper techniques to demonstrate their environmental causes, to which susceptibility exists, most cases may be readily diagnosed and treated in the absence of drug therapy.

Finally, although headaches are sometimes said to be on a psychogenic basis, I have not been able to demonstrate such a relationship. If this exists, it must be exceedingly rare.

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