There are many types of headaches, and some are more painful than others. Among the most painful of all headaches is a little known affliction called cluster headache. It is quite rare, but its diagnostic frequency is completely out of proportion with the intensity of the pain encountered by sufferers. Indeed, women with cluster headaches who have also given birth describe the sensation of an attack as being more intense than delivering a child.

Those unfamiliar with cluster headaches need only imagine what it would feel like to have a hot spike driven through one of their eyes and into their brains. Further, they should imagine this painful sensation recurring on a regular basis during an unknown period of weeks, months, or sometimes years. Attacks come on with little warning. In the midst of a cluster headache it is quite impossible to keep a thought in one's mind. So intense is the pain that that many are unable to sit still, and once the restlessness and agony subsides, any sense of relief is short lived. The next attack is all but a certainty.

This is what sufferers of cluster headaches have to live with. There is no cure for the condition, and treatment options are often unreliable. At present, cluster headache is treated with a combination of drugs. Some medications are intended to abort an attack just before or shortly after it has begun. Abortive treatments need to be fast acting agents to be of any benefit to the afflicted. Physicians may prescribe sumatriptan, or another triptan drug, in a nasal spray or injectable form. Some have found relief by breathing pure oxygen, or from a nasally administered local anesthetic. These treatments are usually employed in parallel with a separate regimen designed to disrupt a cluster headache cycle, and to hopefully prevent the next one.

Preventive treatments for cluster headache patients include short term use of corticosteroids, such as prednisone, or synthetic brain hormones, such as ergotamine. Longer term treatments include calcium channel blockers, such as verapamil, and in some cases lithium carbonate may be prescribed. However, all of the above short and long term treatments possess unpleasant and sometimes dangerous side effects, and all too often the treatments are unsuccessful. Chronic sufferers of cluster headache may opt for a surgical procedure that involves burning or removing part of the patient's trigeminal nerve, which will certainly eliminate the pain. Unfortunately,

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