Plagued by Migraines, Jennifer’s Husband Found a Piercing Cure

By Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D.

When we were 30 and just having our first child, my husband woke up one day nauseous, light sensitive, feeling like his head was about to explode.

“Did you ever see that movie in the ‘70s, Scanners?” he asked. “That’s how my head feels, like it’s going to burst from the inside. I wonder if the drill through the forehead would help? It didn’t seem to for the guy in the movie.”

A first migraine

We realized that he was having his first migraine. His grandmother had suffered from them all her life, but he didn’t think it had been passed on to him genetically, and knew that more women got them than men.

I told him to lie down in the bedroom and I closed the shades and doors, making it as dark as possible. I put a bucket by his side (in case he needed to vomit), and let him lie still in the quiet room all day long, unable to do anything to distract himself from the pain and nausea or relieve the boredom.

By the next day, it was mostly gone—his head felt like a rung bell that was still ringing, and some nausea lingered in the pit of his gut, but he was functional.

That first day was the worst—or seemed so—but he began getting them several times a year.

Over the decades, they became less debilitating but more frequent, until he was having them 3-4 times a month, for 1-4 days.

He had to live on ibuprofen, which he didn’t like taking, but nothing else worked for him.

He looked for triggers, talked to doctors, tried alternative preventions and remedies, had acupuncture and chiropractic, but nothing helped much.

James developed his own protocol with hot showers, meditation, espresso, acupressure, and supplements (magnesium, Co-Q10, and turmeric), which all seemed to help.

A little.

Sometimes.

In the meantime, he never stopped looking for a cure.

The trivia team comes up with a piercing answer

One evening last year he was out at a weekly trivia game with his regular team. His friend, a retired M.D., was talking to another friend who also suffered from migraines.

“You could try the piercing,” she suggested.

My husband’s ears perked up.

“Are you talking about migraines? What ‘piercing’?!” he asked.

They explained that there was an unusual ear piercing, right along the where the vagus nerve branches through the ear, that many people had found helped their migraines.

He was not a man for piercings—he doesn’t even wear any jewelry, other than a wedding ring—but was ready to try anything.

He couldn’t find any statistically significant studies in the scientific literature, but an online community of migraine sufferers polled their members who had the piercing.

Of 1,100 respondents, more than two thirds had noticed significant reduction in frequency of migraines, intensity of migraines, or both. One fifth of the respondents hadn’t had a migraine since.

“…the surveys I have read suggest to have the side done where the migraine tends to manifest. I had migraines on both sides so had both sides done and have not had one since 2017.” ~FB commenter E.D.

“It’s been 7 years now, and not one single migraine since! I walked in with one, got these daith piercings, and walked out without… I literally had them for 30+ years and at times lost my vision and sought treatment from neurologists. I even removed them 2 years ago and still do NOT HAVE migraines.” ~FB commenter S.J.

James decided to try it. He went in person to local piercing shops. The first piercer blabbered on about how they couldn’t offer piercings to treat anything medical, and about how there was ‘no evidence’; but he could just try it anyway. If it didn’t work, the piercer said, he’d still have a cool piercing, and if he didn’t like that, he could take it out.

The second piercer was more enthusiastic and encouraging.

“I get women coming in all the time for this. They come in with a migraine. Ninety-five percent of the time they walk out without one. I can put it in the right spot, very close to the nerve.”

“Doth thou want to be free of migraines?”

This piercing is called a “daith.” It’s an edgy piercing, deep in the middle of the whorls of the ear, through thick cartilage.

It was invented around 1990, named for one of the Hebrew words for “knowledge”, and should be pronounced ‘doth,’ as in “Doth thou wish to be free of migraines?”

The needle goes in behind a fold of the ear in a spot that can’t be seen from the front, and comes out just inside the ear canal itself.

While in the U.S., piercers can’t offer it for medical purposes, in the U.K. there’s a whole chain business that does nothing but this piercing for migraine sufferers.

The theory is that this piercing affects the VNS, or Vagal Nervous System. The vagal nerve is the biggest, most complicated nerve in the body. It controls a lot of functions, including inflammation. By pressing on the vagal nerve, the piercing reduces inflammation of blood vessels in the brain.

A piercing experience

James went back to the second piercer.

The piercer looked carefully, then quickly and confidently put the long, curved, hollow needle through. It made crunchy noises as it went through the cartilage, which my husband found more noticeable than the pain.

James walked out with a shiny silver hoop in the middle of his ear.

That was six months ago, and he hasn’t had a migraine since.

He feels freed of them.

He thinks that maybe once or twice, the morning sunlight has looked a little bright (that was his migraine ‘tell’), but he couldn’t perceive any pain or nausea.

Maybe the top of his right eye felt a little pressure?

Maybe not.

He wonders if they’re gone, or just so infrequent and so mild that they aren’t even noticeable.

But who cares? The daith worked for him, and that’s good enough.

Many thanks for this personal story by Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D., an award-winning journalist and author. Find her on her Substack.

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