Rumination about my tension headache problem and on suffering

My doctor says that I should avoid thinking about my tension headache, and I concur with that statement to a large extent. Yet, I believe that I need some space to ruminate about the significance of this sensation so that I might garner some perspective to this uncomfortable condition that has been affecting me for a long time now. I just wish for some perspective onto the matter, in the hope that it shall give me some measure of reprief from this malady, which has caused no shortage of trouble to my life.

The condition, which has been called a tension headache by professionals in the medical field, remains a rather enigmatic character, despite my having its acquaintance for about slightly more than one and half year now. It feels like a constriction of nerves, veins, or muscles, within the head. Sometimes it feels like the pressure is from the outer layers of the head compressing inwards, and at other times, like a pressure originating from within the recesses of the brain exerting outwards. It hasn't been too severe in recent months, but nonetheless, discomforting. Just this afternoon, it felt like a rather strong pressure concentrated atop my head, which was moderately painful. The sensation now feels like it has dissipated, and is stretching along a strip running middle across the vertical direction of my head. The outermost muscle within the head feels rather taut, and if I shall move my neck, I can feel the stretch exerted by the tautness within the head. It feels like the muscles within the head are so strained all the time, as if they had just completed a workout at the gym and are sore from the lactic acid build-up. From time to time, I get this strange muscle spasm sensation in the head, which feels like a wave of tingling sensation coursing through the head muscle.

This condition remains as mysterious to me as it ever was when it first began. I had gone for an MRI brain scan a few months after this sensation started, but the results revealed no abnormalities. The measures that I have resorted to so far includes going for massages, trying out meditation, and consuming the anti-depressant Prozac. Painkillers don’t work, and furthermore, are not safe for consumption over a long-term as they can cause liver failure. I am hoping that that there is some natural way that the body can heal itself.

This condition has made me think quite a lot about the subject of suffering. I don’t think I can ever exempt myself from being troubled from personal pain or suffering. The tenets of Buddhism with its notion of the denial of the self in order to renounce suffering strikes me as not relating to the reality of human physical existence. I think that people should take steps in preventing the occurrence of suffering, either to themselves or to others

Yet, I do think that it is good for one to learn how to cope with various problems or suffering in as best a manner as possible. It is not practically possible to totally take all sort of precautions to prevent suffering to oneself. Despite one’s best efforts, one can still encounter the woes of uncontrollable forces that has repercussions on one’ quality of life. There are indeed many forms of suffering that occurs to various people without any fault that can be ascribed to them for their afflictions.

It would be good to be able to put things in perspective, and not let one’s perception of one’s suffering be more than what it actually is. I don’t discount the possibility that a person’s suffering can still indeed be very grave, and that ‘putting things in perspective’ might not necessary be helpful because such suffering may indeed be very troubling if you indeed appraise it for what it is. If it is possible to be alleviated, I think steps should be made to alleviate it. But if there truly isn’t, then it may be necessary for the sufferer to try to cope despite his suffering as best as possible. I won’t say that this is easy. Sometimes, it might be good to put away even the attempt to try to understand or appraise the suffering, and simply take it as it is and live on, because any attempts to understand it is futile. The presence of pain, in my opinion, is like the existence of material objects, an objective fact. It might be artificial to try to impute a rationale for it, as much as it would be artificial to try to impute the rationale of the existence of objective matters. Thus, I think that such questions such as “Why am I suffering?” or “What can I hope to gain from suffering?” can be somewhat quite artificial if one presuppose that necessarily an answer.

I am hoping to recover from this condition, and will try to take as best a measure as possible to facilitate my recovery from it. But I figure that I must learn to cope with it, even if this condition does not go away. I must ‘put some perspective’ about this problem in my life and not let it be more than what it actually is.

What is true Faith?

Today’s sermon at church by the pastor was about faith. The pastor gave his sermon based on Hebrews 11 and his sermon was titled Faith of the Ancients. The character of Abraham was used as a model of true faith.

What exactly is faith? There seems to be many definition of what faith is. For this sermon in church today, the pastor states that faith is expressed in obedience to God. The pastor points out Abraham’s obedience to God’s command to go into a new land, as well as to God’s test of him to sacrifice his son Isaac. A Christian friend who recommended me to go for deliverance services in order to receive healing from my tension headache tells me that the faith asked of is not so much about believing that God will heal me, but more of an experimental nature of recognizing the possibility that God may heal me. He terms it “experimental faith”.

I was googling about Christian solutions to obsessive compulsive disorder. Okay, the reason is that I suspect that I might be suffering from a certain obsessive compulsive disorder known as “hypochondria” in that I have preoccupative thoughts about health-related worries. I have worried about things like “damage to cardiovascular health due to passive smoking”, “mercury poisoning from breaking lab thermometer”, “electromagnetic radiation from CRT computer screen”, “brain damage from alcohol consumption”, “brain damage from hitting head on floor” etc. Perhaps this preoccupation with my tinnitus and tension headache are also obsessive in nature, and over-proportionate to their severity. These obsessive health-related worries can be quite debilitating as they can occupy my thought for an entire day and last for months. I was thinking that Christianity might offer solutions to my obsessive worries.

There is this Christian psychiatrist by the name of Ian Osbourne who has written a book titled “Can Christianity cure obsessive-compulsive disorder?” He has a website with the address ocdandchristianity.com where he writes information on strategies to deal with obsessive compulsive worries. His proposition borrows from his understanding of a new approach in the world of psychology to deal with OCD named “responsibility transfer therapy” (RTT). The idea of RTT is for the sufferer of the OCD to release himself or herself from the obsessive worry by transferring the responsibility of the worry to another person to handle. For example, a person who worries obsessively about not turning off the gas before leaving the house would delegate that responsibility to check that the gas is turned off to another person, thereby relieving him or her from some measure of that obsessive sense of responsibility to ensure that the gas is turned off. Using this psychology paradigm to describe the Christian approach of trusting in God, this responsibility is here transferred to God. An excerpt from the website below.

“A person suffering from fire obsessions, for instance, turns to God and allows him to take responsibility for the prevention of fire. The individual tormented by contamination obsessions gives to God the responsibility for whether or not he will get a disease. The person who fears she has offended God leaves responsibility for any offense to God….Devout individuals with OCD must work to resist compulsions. In doing so they demonstrate or prove, both to God and to themselves, how much they trust him and love him.”

This Christian RTT approach relies on the notion of faith in God in its method. The writer has provided an excerpt of what faith here entails.

“Theologian Martin Buber illuminates the issue. In his seminal book, Two Types of Faith, Buber begins with this proposition: “There are two, and only two, types of faith: The one from the fact that I trust someone . . . the other from the fact that I acknowledge a thing to be true.” Religious faith, according to Buber, always involves, most basically, either trusting in God or believing in a revealed truth. It is the first type of faith, he is displayed on every page of the Old Testament, as well as in most every sermon by Jesus. It involves unconditional trust in a God who is personal, vital, loving, and trustworthy.

This has great relevance for OCD sufferers. One of the things most puzzling about them is their inability to be reassured about their obsessional fears. People with religious obsessions can be told again and again that Jesus died for them, and that salvation awaits them, yet they still have agonizing doubts. Obsessionals, in fact, have great difficulty in believing in any fact that directly opposes one of their obsessions. OCD sufferers cannot even take as a fact what they see with their own eyes: they can stare straight at a light switch, see that it is off, and yet fear that it is on.  OCD sufferers have a hard time believing in facts. They are doubters. Yet they are very good at trusting in others. It is trust in the person of God—in his power and his mercy—that OCD sufferers must rely on.

For instance, in the case of a person who obsesses that a fire will start in her stove, the right kind of faith is to leave the possibility of a fire with God. If God should, for God’s own reasons, want a fire to start, then he will start one. If he doesn't, he won’t. The wrong kind of faith is to have “faith” that a fire won’t start. For another example. Suppose a person obsesses that he has lost his salvation, and will go to

hell. The right type of faith is to leave his eternal destiny in the hands of God.

The OCDer is called to a deep kind of faith: trust in the ultimate power and mercy of God. We can be greatly consoled by a confident hope that God will prevent an obsessional fear from being realized, a hope that is based on our trust in God's mercy and love. But we can't have factual certainty.”

I appreciate the distinction made by the theologian in the excerpt above. Basically, it is a distinction of faith about the factual certainty of God doing something according to one’s wishes, and a ‘milder’, less demanding sort of faith of simply trusting in God. However, a question I want to ask is what kind of faith is actually asked of in the bible. And here, I can quote two scripture giving different answers. There is the one in Hebrews 11 which seems to indicate faith of the kind that requires belief in factual certainty of the fulfillment of the request to God – “And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” Then there is the account of Jesus healing the leper in Luke 5. In that account, the leper begged Jesus “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean”. I thought that the faith expressed by the leper, as connoted by his words is more of the ‘milder kind’ in the sense that he has faith in the power of Jesus to heal, but he still leaves as a question of whether he would be healed on the basis of Jesus’ willingness to heal. Now, I will highlight that there is still a thin distinction between the faith described here with that ‘milder’ version of faith in the Martin Buber excerpt above. The leper expresses his faith in Jesus ability to heal, whereas Martin Buber’s ‘milder’ faith simply expresses trust in God given any circumstances, even if things go against the desired wishes of the person holding onto this faith. (Trust me guys, there is even more of such mind-numbing delineating of concepts and definitions in law studies, and some law school students who quite inadvertently develop a habit to see a need for clarification of such delineation in whatever they discuss. I see that theologians may come second in the running for such vain inquisitions)

Personally, I think the ‘milder’ kinds of faith is more reasonably to be asked of a person than a faith demanding a belief in the certainty of the fulfillment of the request. I mean, why does God have to require that his subject believe whole-heartedly that he, God, will do what the subject want before he does what the subject wants? It seems idiosyncratic to me.

In this website containing Philip Yancey’s synopsis for his book “Prayer – Does it make any difference”, Yancey concludes on that question of prayer with “I now see it [Prayer] not so much as a way of getting God to do my will as a way of being available to get in the stream of what God wants to accomplish on earth.” I don’t think Yancey is necessarily theologically substantiated in his drawing up of priorities of the different functions of prayers. I would like to think that I can and should use prayers to make God do the things I want him to, and that this is as equally important an aspect of prayer. There are many examples of such prayers in the bible where the prayee (pardon the legalese) is requesting God to do something that he wants. But I like how Yancey realistically acknowledges the predicament that believers face in having their prayers go unanswered and things not going according to their prayer requests, perhaps the reason why he came to, in my opinion, a disappointing conclusion that the priority of the function of prayers is more of to understand God than to expect a fulfillment of the prayer request. And I appreciate that he does not take the condescending tone that some Christians might take towards another believer by suggesting that that believer’s prayer is not answered because that believer did not have enough faith in God, or that that believer “did not ask for God to come into his or her heart”. A harsh logical understanding of scriptural passage may lead to such conclusions in my opinion.

Law school starts tomorrow for me, and I can’t say that I am feeling too prepared to deal with school given my prevailing conditions. I did experience a lot of difficulties for the past few semesters because of the tension headache, and perhaps, as what I suspect, from obsessive compulsive disorder and anxiety disorder. Word has it that these conditions are chronic. But I am hoping for this phase to pass and for my mind to be more settled so that I can concentrate on my law studies. I am not sure whether Ian Osbourne whom I mentioned earlier is being truthful or simply trying to be encouraging, but I like what he wrote in his website about how “three of the greatest luminaries in the history of the Christian

religion: Martin Luther, John Bunyan, and Saint Therese of Lisieux” suffered from obsessional fears indicative of OCD as well, in particular, fear of loss of salvation. Martin Luther, progenitor of the protestant faith I know. John Bunyan I have heard of but am not too familiar, and the third one I have not come across (but I should read up on since she is so venerably described by the author, and to ensure that I come off as well-informed in case one of those smart aleck Christians start questioning me on my knowledge of Christian history). I am amused by his identification of disorders based on his study accounts of these historical figures and his thesis that “All three, even more remarkably, after receiving unhelpful advice from their church elders, found a way to conquer their tormenting thoughts through faith. Each found the same solution: Trusting absolutely in God’s power and mercy. In psychological terms, they transferred the responsibility for their obsessional fears to God.” Perhaps I may come to find a similar sense of relief from being able to trust God more.

On obsessive worries and persistent preoccupying thoughts

What should one do about an obsessive worry, or a preoccupative thought that bogs the will of an individual, to the extent that he finds himself quite unable to function in any other manner in life. I guess one method of resort is to pray. It beats worrying silly and putting one’s thoughts obsessively on the issue. But of course, one could argue that it is just as unhelpful to pray in an obsessive manner to God about an issue. But I believe that there may very well be a difference, in the sense that if you believe in God, and accept the teachings of the church that one can and should correspond with God in a manner that is personal to oneself, then it might be considered virtue to talk to God about a worry. The usual teaching that I have hear from my church is that God cares about the things that affects you, and nothing is too small as to be insignificant in his eyes.

I know that in the world of psychology, there are methods employed by a psychiatrist to treat conditions such as obsessive compulsive disorder. I get my impression about psychologists mainly from the media, and from television dramas. One of my favourite US sitcom is the detective show Monk, which features a male detective who suffers from what is palpably the condition of obsessive compulsive disorder. While the psychosis in one sense debilitating to his social life, it is also on the other hand the underlying trait responsible for his genius in his feat of detective sleuthing with his attention to details. Now, one recurrent side archetypal character in that sitcom are the psychologists that Monk, the eponymous protagonist, attends to help him with his obsessive compulsive disorder, which had gotten worse after the death of his wife. The meetings with the psychologist typically features a room with two chairs placed facing each other where the psychologist sits on one of the chair whilst his patient sits on the other. And the dialogue that proceeds follows a certain stereotype where the psychologist sits by the chair with a pencil and a notebook in hand, and scribbles points of notes as his patient rattles details according to the questions prodded by the psychologist. Thereafter, the psychologist makes comments based on his observations, articulating the unspoken thoughts that lies within the recesses of what they call the “region of unconsciousness” that exists in the individual. Traumatic childhood experiences and repressed sensualities are the common lingos of the psychiatrist in explaining the world of the unconscious.

In some ways, praying is quite akin to visiting a psychiatrist, with God as the psychiatrist, and you as the patient. And I do feel that there is something quite therapeutic in the process of simply rumbling on about one’s worries to God, in manners that may be considered incoherent or irrational by others. Does prayer work? Perhaps as much as how psychotherapy may work. The ability to articulate one’s worries and to believe them heard has a calming cathartic effect. But whether prayer works further than that, I do not know. If one expects too much of prayer as a way of obtaining subsistence to his petition, I am afraid that he may go away sorely disappointed, or that he might become disillusioned at the apparent absence of response. That is my experience. And I have found myself railing at God for his seeming lack of response. I thread on the lines of committing grievous sins such as blasphemy in my rancor. Perhaps, if I were more rational or even-headed about how prayer works, I would not have found myself so perturbed and could have avoided the excess of emotions. But perhaps, there may some significance to which anger over disappointment works in one’s correspondence with God. It is like a stage of maturation, in passing, to which its ends lies in some repose obtained from a transcendent enlightenment to the state of affairs, or simply from resignation and acceptance of circumstances. A psychologist appealing to more secular paradigms would probably reference the Kübler-Ross model, also commonly referred to as the five stages of grief. And such stages are quite manifestly expressed in the prayer process. Ranting at God fits in somewhere between the stage of anger and bargaining.

There is another paradigm which is quite beautifully expressed in a show named Joan of Arcadia, and it is called Desolation and Consolation. See this post by James Bradford for an excellent write-up about this paradigm. It’s like what Solomon, or Qoheleth, writes about in Ecclesiastes – A time for everything. There is a time for desolation, or to feel aggrieved and have misgiving towards God, and there is a time for consolation, where things seems to make sense, there is a sense of inner peace, and God seems loving and kind.

Ali Sulteneh and the controversial cure for tension headaches

What does a tension headache feel like? A tension headache feels like an inner muscle constipation in the head. There is this soreness that you can feel to the muscles that are within the head. And somehow, you wish that the muscles would just learn to relax itself and get that sensation to go away. I am trying my best not to focus too much on the sensation and to learn how to get along in life even if it might not go away. But I would have to say that that is as much a challenge for me for I have a mind that tends towards being overconcerned about such sensations. The focus on the sensation can pretty much suck up all the mental resource I have to focus on anything else. In computer geekspeak, it is like a virus that infects a computer, draining all available memory space from the system and causing the system to lag. In my case, the computer system is my brain’s mental energy, and the tension headache like the virus that is demanding all the brain’s mental energy that it can’t function effectively for other mental processes.

So I suppose as with any other problems or issues that one might face in life, a multi-prong approach might be the best way to deal with the problem. Firstly, I am trying to find a cure for my tension headache. Secondly, I am trying to prepare myself to be able to get along with my life even if I have to live with the tension headache.

I was looking up for an online community on the internet which would feature people dealing with the same problem as I am, and to find if they have any solution to it, or methods of coping with the problem. I was thinking that facebook would be a good resource to find an online community. There is this group about such issues as tension headaches and neuralgia that is started by this guy by the name of Ali Sulteneh. He is supposedly a neurosurgeon from Syria, and he claims to have found a cure to these medical conditions. What further caught my attention in the site mentioned is that he alleges how his cure has been stolen by these other doctors who have not given him credit for his work. And he goes onto youtube videos featuring these other doctors speaking about this method for curing headaches and ranting about how these other doctors are thieves.

Apparently, he has created a commotion amongst the headache community with his rant, spilling diatribes against all sort of people he perceives as oppressing him. A blogger who writes about the happenings in the community for migraine sufferers writes in her blog post how Ali Sulteneh had harassed her friend who manages a migraine community website. Her response to Ali Sulteneh is that he should seek legal help if indeed he has been unfairly appropriated of his work as his current manner of haranguing people does not help him at all. Which I thought is a good advice that Ali Sulteneh should be following.

Brushing these disputes that I have come across, I am actually interested in these supposed breakthrough cures for tension headache. There is this youtube video by one of such doctors that Ali Sulteneh has accused of being a thief. His name is Elliot Shevel, a South African specialist surgeon. In that video, Shevel talks about how he observes that patients with tension headaches report relief from their tension headache when they went for a plastic surgery operation which is totally unconnected to their intention for treatment of their tension headaches. He concludes that the plastic surgery operation touched upon certain arteries that are responsible for the tension headaches. The surgical cure that he develops borrows from his observation of these cases in plastic surgery in order to treat migraines. He says that by a simple surgical procedure of “cauterization” of the arteries, the tension headache can be relieved. And the bonus here is that the surgery is a minimally invasive one.

According to a WebMD article however, the technique is controversial. Foremost, the theory of how a tension headache is controversial. Ali Sulteneh’s theory is that arteries outside the skull, known as extracranial arteries, are responsible for these headaches. However, in that article, the author cites the opinion of another migraine expert named Seymour Diamond, MD, who says that Ali Sulteneh’s surgery is not any more effective that the host of other surgical approaches that have been tried over the years.

"We have learned in recent years that migraines occur in the deep blood vessels that surround the brain and within the brain, not on the superficial scalp arteries that [Sultaneh] is talking about," Diamond says. "This dubious surgical approach just doesn't match what we know happens with these headaches."

I guess I am pretty much at square one regarding my search for a solution to my tension headache problem.