Millions of Americans share Michele Bachmann's challenges with controlling migraine headaches

The pain can be excruciating, ranking with kidney stones and childbirth. And all it may take to trigger a migraine headache is a few missed meals, fitful sleep or stressful working conditions.

Migraines, as the almost 30 million Americans who suffer them know, are nothing to take lightly. So reports of the severe migraines experienced by Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann have raised questions about how the condition may affect her ability to handle the nation's highest office.

The Minnesota congresswoman said in a statement that migraines have never kept her from functioning and wouldn't keep her from serving as commander in chief.

Headache specialists agree that migraines don't have to be debilitating when properly managed with medication and lifestyle measures. Though Bachmann released a physician's statement Wednesday, without detailed medical records not enough is known to predict how she might fare under Oval Office pressures.

Someone who has accomplished as much as Bachmann surely has strong coping skills, noted Dr. Kavita Kalidas, a headache specialist and neurologist at Tampa General Hospital and the University of South Florida.

Certainly, the presidency is no stranger to medical problems.

"We certainly have had presidents with illnesses that were more serious," said Dr. Diana Pollock, a neurologist at Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater. She noted that migraines are prevalent in all walks of life.

"I don't think it should eliminate anybody from holding the office of president."

Migraines are characterized by pulsating pain, often on one side of the head. They can be accompanied by nausea and intense sensitivity to light and sound. Without treatment, a migraine typically lasts four to 72 hours.

Women are three times more likely than men to suffer from migraines, which can be triggered by hormonal changes.

"We've come a long way in the management of migraines," Kalidas said. "Initially, this was considered some sort of hysteria and a women's problem, or it's-all-in-your-head type of diagnosis."

For many patients, she said, modern medications taken at a migraine's onset can relieve pain in as little as 10 to 15 minutes. Drugs used to treat seizures and control blood pressure, as well as antidepressants, also are effective in reducing frequency and severity of headaches.

Bachmann, 55, said she controls her condition with prescription medication. She said the condition has not gotten in the way of her campaign schedule or her congressional duties.

She released a letter Wednesday from the attending physician to Congress stating she is "overall in good general health" and experiences migraines "infrequently."

"Your migraines occur infrequently and have known trigger factors of which you are aware and know how to avoid," wrote Dr. Brian Monahan. "When you do have a migraine, you know how to control it."

The Daily Caller website drew national attention to her migraine history with a report late Monday that Bachmann experiences episodes once a week on average and can be "incapacitated'' for days.

Citing unnamed sources, it reported that on at least three occasions, she has been hospitalized due to migraines.

In July 2010, Bachmann missed eight House votes while being treated for a migraine at a Washington hospital, according to POLITICO.

Even when suffering, Kalidas said, most patients still can make decisions at work and continue everyday tasks. Still, many with severe pain will need to lie down, said Pollock, noting that drug therapies are most effective when begun right when symptoms begin.

Dr. Lucas Bachmann, the candidate's son and a medical resident at the University of Connecticut, told the New York Times that his mother began experiencing migraines about 15 years ago.

Bachmann's son, who does not treat his mother, said she has sought emergency treatment in urgent-care centers at least twice while traveling. She received nonnarcotic injections and was monitored by doctors, but did not require overnight stays.

Matt Harrison finding consistency

He's dealt with a blister, an annoying kidney stone that took 10 days to pass and a triceps bruise. But Matt Harrison's biggest challenge was staying away from the big inning and becoming a consistent starter in the Rangers rotation.

He's doing it. Harrison is 5-3 with a 1.94 ERA in his last 10 starts. He has quality starts in all but two of them and is averaging nearly 6 2/3 innings in that span. Harrison's latest success story was Sunday in Seattle, when he held the Mariners to five hits and one run in 7 2/3 innings, earning the victory. It was the Rangers' 11th straight win and puts them four games up in the AL West.

"I think I'm stronger mentally," said Harrison, who was reading pitching psychology books in spring training. "I'm not letting the big inning happen and I'm executing. I take time in between batters to focus."

Harrison's sinker was working for him Sunday. He said he was able to throw it in any count and know he could get a strike or a ground ball. And he got plenty of those. He had 14 outs that were ground balls or strikeouts, with his biggest coming to his final batter.

After the Mariners had scored their first run of the game in the eighth inning on a Jack Wilson single, Harrison faced Ichiro Suzuki as the tying run.

"If I put him on, there's no telling what happens there," Harrison said.

The 25-year-old lefty got ahead in the count 0-2 on fastballs and then threw a nasty changeup that had plenty of break.

"It was a pitch he hadn't seen before in the previous at-bats," Harrison said. "I was able to speed him up with fastballs before that."

The strikeout allowed Mark Lowe to enter the game with one on and two outs against right-handed hitting Franklin Gutierrez, who grounded out to end the inning. Neftali Feliz came on and did what he always does against the Mariners: no-hit them. Seattle is 0-for-33 with 13 Ks and two walks against Feliz for his career.

"He kept us in the ballgame, got us deep in the ballgame," manager Ron Washington said of Harrison. "He's stayed away from the big inning, pounded the strike zone, not staying in one part of the plate and working fast. All of that comes into play."

Harrison was pleased with his rhythm and has made an effort to be quick, but not too quick. He's found a happy medium between the guy with the super-fast windup last year and the one who works fast, but more calmly on the mound. The result is a starter gaining confidence with each start.

Peru travel experts share Machu Picchu memories

I choose not to recall the time I passed a kidney stone there, or another occasion when a Japanese woman wearing high-heeled shoes, just ahead of me, fell to her death off Huayna Picchu. Notwithstanding these dramas, Machu Picchu has been very kind to me, and I’ll honor her (she is female, of course) with one of my fondest memories.

Back in the nineteen-eighties I was dragging my hot, sweaty boots down the last leg of the Inca Trail past Intipunku, facing that amazing view, when I noticed that something unusual was afoot down on the esplanade.

A crowd, tiny at this distance, swarmed around the eastern terraces, and as I watched, formed up and seemed to settle into place. Then I heard strange noises, formless and eerie, which resolved themselves into the sound of an orchestra tuning its instruments.

The volume swelled as I neared the Watchman’s Hut and coalesced into the opening bars of a classical piece. After a brief hassle with the authorities — who inevitably thought everyone should pay extra for this unannounced privilege but weren’t sure how much they should charge, or whether they should really charge at all, or whether actually a small tip would do the trick — I found myself seated with a group of my trekking clients and other visitors on the terraces below the Temple of Three Windows.

Gathered across the esplanade from us, solemnly attired in black and white on that warm, sunny day, sat the very same Lima Symphony Orchestra that will be playing there — probably on that very same spot — before the incoming and outgoing politicos and assorted dignitaries this week.

Why that spot? Because orchestras know a thing or two about acoustics, and so, evidently, did the Incas. The orchestra and choir had taken their stand within a large recess at the foot of what Hiram Bingham charmlessly named the Industrial Sector. The sound, often wispy and fugitive in open-air settings, leapt at us off the terraces, full-throated in the mountain air.

Inspired by the Incas’ acoustical magic, the musicians surpassed themselves. They were peforming Mozart’s Requiem, a piece that would wring blood from a stone.

Memory is hazy here, but I seem to remember that the performance was followed by a rapt, lengthy silence. Then the audience recovered its senses and remembered to clap.

'70s SoCal singer-songwriter is back , catch him while you can

"It's kind of like being kicked by a giant mule," said J.D. Souther last week from his wheat farm outside Nashville.

A week earlier, the 65-year-old co-architect of the Southern California '70s country-rock sound had been happily touring, promoting his fine new album, "Natural History," when he was struck down by kidney stones.

Souther didn't waste any time feeling sorry for himself. He was scheduled to appear in Seattle on Sunday, as planned.

That's good to hear, since Souther has been known to disappear. The last time, it was for 25 years.

After writing multiple hits back in the '70s — "Best of My Love" and "New Kid in Town" for the Eagles and "Faithless Love" and "Silver Blue" for onetime girlfriend Linda Ronstadt — he went on hiatus for a quarter century.

Fed up with the music scene, and swimming in a stream of royalties, he built a dream house in the Hollywood Hills, rescued a couple of dogs, rode horseback on pack trips and skied in New Zealand and Colorado. An admirer of the late Northwest poet William Stafford and a friend of beat writer and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Souther also wrote poetry, though he's reluctant to publish his verses.

"Absent the musical landscape, the bar is a little bit higher," he explained.

This is the man who wrote (in "I'll Be Here at Closing Time"), "Is that a ring on your finger / Or just a thin and fading line?" — which in two lines pretty handily conjures the image of a lonely man eyeing up a waitress. But it does sound better sung — certainly when he sings it.

It's on his latest album, which compiles 10 songs — including his own 1979 Roy Orbison-inspired hit, "You're Only Lonely" — in a minimalist, noir setting, featuring his pristine guitar, tenor voice (sharpened to pure crystal) and occasional solos by jazz players.

Souther came up playing jazz drums and saxophone in Amarillo, Texas, and, remarkably, never picked up a guitar till he was 22. When he did, he applied a jazz harmonic sense to it (like that weird repeated chord in "Silver Blue"). His 2008 comeback album, "If the World Was You," had a jazz twist, too.

But for Souther, it's a straight line from the Great American Songbook of Cole Porter and George Gershwin to latter-day standards written by James Taylor, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Souther himself.

"I can do 'Faithless Love' and follow it with Fats Waller," he said.

Which is apparently what he does in his show.

By all means, check him out before he decides to take another sabbatical.

WPSD Anchor Donates a Kidney to Her Oldest Son

WPSD‘s Johnette Worak will take a break from her morning and mid-day anchor duties this summer to donate a kidney to her adult son, who suffers from cystinuria, a condition that leaves patients with chronic kidney stones.

Worak and her son, Rodney (pictured here), will undergo surgery tomorrow at the University of Kentucky Transplant Center. Rodney was diagnosed as a teenager, Worak wrote on the WPSD website. “Last October, two weeks after he got married, his kidneys shut down. We’ve been working toward transplant surgery ever since, and if all goes well, it will be almost as if Rodney’s kidneys never failed. (The success rate is 95 percent in our favor.)”

Worak, who is also the NBC affiliate’s medical reporter, expects to return to her anchoring duties in August. “Certainly not going to be fun, but we think it’s going to be worth it!” She wrote. “In the meantime, we hope you’ll keep us in your thoughts and prayers.”

‘Bigger and hotter’ but unchanging

For a rookie watcher, Jeff Smith picked the ideal spot — on the shady side of Peachtree Battle, seated on a brick pillar. Then again, he did have some feel for the AJC Peachtree Road Race, having run the event 20 or so times.

But not on July 4, 2011. Smith’s foot had been hurting, and he was a spectator at the 2 1/2-mile mark awaiting his wife and his 12-year-old daughter, who were running/walking the Peachtree. And already Smith, an Atlantan since 1988 who’s a technology manager, had seen something new.

“Those guys up front,” he said. “They really run fast.”

Such is the scope of the Peachtree that you can run the race and see a couple hundred thousand folks along the way without ever espying the elite runners, who start first and are long gone by the time the masses begin their trek. “Those guys finished 40 minutes ago,” Smith said, and still the 42nd Peachtree was in its nascent stages.

The massive race grew even bigger this year, growing to 60,000 participants. Think of this way: If you took everyone in a sold-out Turner Field — counting Braves and umpires and ushers, too — and arrayed them in rows in front of Lenox Mall, you still wouldn’t quite approximate this elephantine event.

“If it gets much bigger,” Smith said, “it’ll turn into a big walk.”

Not that he was complaining. Smith was having a fine time watching the runners and his young son was enjoying himself leaping at a tree branch. For all that the Fourth of July in Atlanta, Ga., entails — runners and watchers and dogs and crazy costumes and blaring music and the army of volunteers and even a fighter-jet flyover this year — griping doesn’t register. “You notice that nobody is upset,” Smith said. “Everybody’s in a good mood. All these people are in good spirits.”

It was hotter and more humid this Peachtree, and the good-spirited participants were sweating harder than usual after 2 1/2 miles. “And they haven’t gotten to the hill [in front of Piedmont Hospital] yet,” Smith said. But still: Over its four-plus decades of existence, this signature Atlanta event has proved indestructible.

Why, Smith was asked, is that so? Why is the Peachtree such a humongous deal?

“People are always looking for ways to celebrate the Fourth,” he said. “I’ll see people at the Peachtree that I only see once a year.”

Not far from Smith’s perch sat Jean Ingram and Blanche Roberts, sisters-in-law from Sharpsburg, Ga. They used to park themselves in front of the big water oak at Peachtree Battle, but a few years ago they scooted up the street because the tree’s roots grew.

When last this correspondent encountered Ingram and Roberts, the year was 2002 and they were accompanied by two of Ingram’s grandchildren, the younger of them in a stroller. On this day those grandchildren — Taylor, 19, and Tiffany,  13 — were running the race. As ever, so was Ferma Ingram, the 73-year-old husband of Jean and brother of Blanche.

“It’s bigger and hotter,” Roberts said, speaking of this installment of the Peachtree.

A few updates: Since 2002, Ingram has retired as postmaster of Sharpsburg and Roberts from her job as a teacher. Their Peachtree ritual, however, hasn’t changed: They left home at 5:30 a.m., were in place by 6 and came wearing red, white and blue. (Although Ingram’s sequined vistor of years past had, alas, fallen apart; it has been replaced by a “Peachtree Road Race Spectator” visor.)

Afterward the family — some 32 members were expected this year — would convene at Ingram’s house for the staple grilling-out. As for her indefatigible husband, who was running the 42nd Peachtree at age 73, Ingram said: “He’s had cancer; he’s had open-heart surgery.”

“About ready for brain surgery,” said Roberts of her brother.

“One year he ran with a kidney stone,” Ingram said. “Another year he ran with a cracked rib. After his open-heart surgery, we had someone run with him to make sure he didn’t fall over.”

Let the record reflect that Ferma Ingram and the other five members of the Ingram/Roberts running party — each of their names were pasted in glitter on a poster mounted on a wall — made the 6.2 miles without wilting Monday. “They’re still coming into the house,” said Ingram, speaking by phone from Sharspburg shortly after noon.

Earlier, someone had wondered when big becomes too big. Not just yet, came the sisters-in-law’s considered verdict. Said Ingram: “They organize it so well.”

Said Roberts: “Sixty thousand is a good number.”

Warning: Radiation risks from medical imaging

Ever since the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster in Japan in March, there has been a lot of interest in the media about the health effects of exposure to radiation  including those from medical imaging such as X-rays and CT (computed tomography) scans. Many patients want to know if radiation from mammograms, bone density tests, nuclear imaging, PET scans, and so forth will increase their risk of developing cancer.

The ability to peer inside the body is nothing short of miraculous and has saved countless lives since X-rays were discovered more than a century ago. Today, the array of imaging tests available is bewildering, the technology intimidating, and circumstances and possible outcomes (Is it cancer? A stroke? A heriniated disc?) often terrifying. For most people, there’s very little risk from routine X-rays such as chest X-rays or dental X-rays. But experts have become increasingly concerned about the overuse of many types of scans, not only because of the huge and growing expense, but even more of the potential risk posed by the cumulative exposure to radiation. They are used to diagnose diseases, trauma, and abnormalities, as well as to guide and monitor treatment.

The radiation you get from X-ray, CT, and nuclear imaging is ionizing radiation — high-energy wavelengths or particles that penetrate tissue to reveal the body’s internal organs and structures. Ionizing radiation can damage DNA, and although your cells repair most of the damage, they sometimes do the job imperfectly, leaving small areas of “misrepair.” The result is DNA mutations that may contribute to cancer years down the road.

Exposure to ionizing radiation from natural or background sources hasn’t changed for the past 30 years, but in many industrialized countries, total per capita radiation has nearly doubled, and experts believe the main reason is increased exposure that comes from medical sources which has grown from 15 percent in the early 1980s to 50 percent today. CT alone accounts for 24 percent of all radiation exposures.

Most of what we know about the risks of ionizing radiation comes from long-term studies of people who survived the 1945 atomic bomb blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These studies show a slightly but significantly increased risk of cancer in those exposed to the blasts, including a group of 25,000 Hiroshima survivors who received less than 50 mSv of radiation  an amount you might get from two or three CT scans.


Because they’re so commonly used today, CT scans are the biggest source of radiation of all imaging technologies. A special type of X-ray that produces cross-sectional images, or “slices,” of the body, CT scans are used to diagnose everything, from heart diseases and cancer to brain tumors, kidney stones, and injuries. Abdominal CT scans tend to produce the most radiation — averaging about 500 times more radiation than a simple chest X-ray, and 1,000 times more than a dental X-ray or bone mineral density test (DEXA). Other types of imaging that use radiation include nuclear diagnostic tests, such as PET scans, as well as fluoroscopy. MRI and ultrasound, in contrast, do not use radiation.

The risk from a single CT scan, when appropriately done, is miniscule, but radiation exposures add up over a lifetime. A study in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 2009 estimated that 72 million scans were done in the US in 2007. After excluding scans done following a diagnosis of cancer and those performed during the last five years of a person’s life, the researchers projected that CT scans in the US would cause about 29,000 extra cases of cancer in the future and about 14,5000 deaths. That’s about two percent of all annual cancers.