The Headache: The Science of a Most Confounding Affliction―and a Search for Relief

A sometimes harrowing and frequently humorous journey into the author’s own excruciating headaches, and the science behind these surprisingly mysterious disorders

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. 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. 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 to reveal how they became one of the most under-researched afflictions in medicine—and how that is slowly starting to change.