Saturday, 5 April 2014

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Could sharing be the best Tweetment?

I'm still trying to get my throbbing noggin around this curious article. According to Dr Alexandre DaSilva of the University of Michigan, 21,741 tweets can be found on Twitter describing the experience of suffering a migraine, many of which were made by people actually in the throes of an attack.

How faces appear to someone suffering a migraine aura attack before they lose the plot.

What strikes me as odd is that these people's first instinct is to share their pain on Twitter when mine is to close my eyes in a dark room and rock back and to wishing I was dead. Even more baffling is how they can string a coherent sentence together, or actually find the right letters on their keyboards or touch-screen phones with an ice-pick sticking out of their temples.

Last time I had to send a text message in the midst of a migraine aura episode, it took me an hour and a half to bash out two sentences, and even then, what the person I was supposed to be meeting received was utter gibberish. They couldn't decide if I was drunk, joking or 'stroking' (you know, as in having a seizure). All of which leaves me wondering if what these people are truly experiencing is a bit of a headache and a chronic case of hyperbolic attention seeking.

So now we know that x percent of migraineurs describe their condition as "OMG, the most worstest, major head %$£* of all time", and 44% of Twitterers report a change in mood (no, really?), how much further along are we in understanding the disorder or knowing how to treat it?