Rizatriptan

There can be dangerous interactions with other drugs that are often used in the same kinds of patients, and these include serotonin syndrome, which can be lethal.

The things to watch out for are antidepressants, citalopram, fluoxetine, sertraline, duloxetine, and m- migraine medications like sumatriptan and rizatriptan.

That's Imitrex and Maxalt in the United States.

There are a lot of different forms of buprenorphine available now.

I won't go into those here, but I will include them in the show notes.

Most people, if they have one or two a month, they're gonna be like, "No, I'm, I'm fine.

As long as I have my Maxalt to take, well, I do fine with it." But if somebody's getting four or three, four, maybe more headaches a month, then we start thinking about should we use a beta blocker or an anticonvulsant? We can use CGRP monoclonal antibodies.

We can use different things, and there are more newer medications now for migraines that would be preventative.

It's just always that, um, balance between, well, if it just happens a couple times or it happens sporadically, you probably don't want to take a medicine every day for it.

I forget, I forget what the regimen was, but there were three types of envelopes.

Your envelope either said Maxalt, which is an actual migraine drug-

Uh-huh

... or it said placebo.

Mm-hmm.

Or the third case was that your envelope said Maxalt or placebo, we won't tell.

Okay? So some people thought they were getting a placebo, some thought they were getting the medication, and some thought they don't know.

So can I guess which order the, the results came back in? Because my guess would be Maxalt's number one, is the thing that actually does something, followed by the envelope where you're, where you can't tell, followed by the placebo.

Mm-hmm.

Um, been taking Maxalt since probably 15 or 16, 10 milligrams.

It still works, but this time of the year and in the fall, I'll get them sometimes four to f- six times a week, um, when the weather's changing out here.

Hmm.

I don't take anything other than-

Okay

... other than Maxalt.

And, and does the Maxalt abort the headaches or not?

This new class of medicines has been great for treating migraines.

I'll never forget... probably 25, 30 years ago when one of the triptans came out, Imitrex specifically, and then followed by drugs like Maxalt and some of those.

They were revolutionary because when people used to come to my office with a severe migraine, they Had photophobia, severe pounding headache, debilitating, really, vomiting.

You know, you give them a shot of Demerol and Phenergan and you send them home to bed rest for a day or two.

So if we change our expectations about the experience of pain, that might change how we feel it.

In 2014, they did this study looking at migraine treatment, and participants were either given a real migraine drug that's called Maxalt or a placebo drug during their migraine attacks.

The drug wasn't the only thing the researchers changed.

They also told the participants different things.

A lot of the time, illnesses like asthma are exacerbated not so much by the closing of the airways, but rather a heightened state of anxiety from a feeling of suffocation, which might explain why patients with no improvements in lung function still self-report them saying that they did.

To answer the questions at the start, yes, a study regarding a drug called Maxalt has shown that simply the labeling of the drugs patients are taking allowed them to experience migraine attacks of reduced intensity.

They were tricked into imagining that they took the migraine medication when they actually didn't, and it still worked.

And yes, hotel cleaning staff that thought they had exercised through their regular work had all noticed significant changes to their body weight, waist to hip ratio, and even their blood pressure.

I went a week with no headache at all.

I have not taken Maxalt in weeks.

This is the longest I have ever gone without a headache since I was in my teens.

Wow.