medication overuse headache

Now, here's the part of today's episode I most need you to sit with because it changes how you should think about every headache tablet in your house.

It's called medication overuse headache, and it's one of the great quiet ironies of modern medicine.

The same painkillers that relieve an individual headache can, with frequent enough use, cause your brain to generate more headaches overall.

The mechanism, as best we understand, involves the same pain signaling systems we just discussed.

Taking a painkiller whenever I get a headache is harmless because it's just a normal painkiller.

As we discovered, frequency is the entire issue.

Fifteen days a month of simple analgesics or ten days a month of the stronger stuff, and you risk crossing into medication overuse headache, where the treatment becomes the disease.

If that's you, the fix isn't more willpower.