Includes bibliographical references and index.

Molehills Out of Mountains -- A Beautiful Disease -- The Night of the Train -- Holes in the Head -- Blood v. Brains -- Pillar to Post -- Painful Thrusts -- The Malingerers -- Awakenings (and Cats) -- Feast, Famine, and the NIH -- The Blind Men and the Elephant -- Our Many Forking Paths

"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"-- Provided by publisher.