My friend Jack He suffers from terrible migraines, but he has an unusual solution: When one starts, he lies down and gently places a vibrator on the top of his forehead, which he swears provides immediate pain relief.
Though unconventional, Jacques’ idea has historical roots. In 1892, neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot observed that patients with Parkinson’s disease improved their tremors after long carriage rides. He attributed this to rhythmic vibrations and invented a rocking chair called the “fatouil trepidant” to replicate the movement. His student Georges-Gilles de La Tourette later adapted the technique to treat migraines with a vibrating helmet. Both treatments produced “a powerful sedative for the nervous system,” Charcot wrote.
While these early inventions fell out of favor, recent studies are reexamining vibration therapy’s potential for treating migraines and beginning to reveal why it could be the breakthrough treatment migraine sufferers have been looking for. “Some people who are using vibration to treat migraines are seeing great results, and it’s very exciting,” says Tie-Quan Le of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, who has been investigating the effects of vibration on migraines.
Despite an estimated 1 billion people worldwide suffering from migraines, little is known about their causes or treatment. Migraines typically begin with an aura (visual disturbances such as flashing lights or twinkling dots), followed by pain, blurred vision, nausea, and sensitivity to light.
The exact cause of migraines remains unknown, but focus has shifted from early theories that blamed vasodilation to a role for inflammation in the hypothalamus, a brain structure involved in pain messages, and in the meninges, three layers of tissue that protect the brain and spinal cord. Current migraine medications constrict blood vessels or block receptors in the pain network, but they do not work for everyone and can cause side effects.
This has led many to seek out alternative treatments like vibration therapy, and online forums are filled with anecdotes similar to Jack’s: “I massaged my neck with a vibrator and the migraines I’d suffered from for years completely disappeared,” wrote one Reddit user.
While some studies have suggested that vibration simply distracts from pain, recent evidence suggests it does more than that. In the first experiment of its kind, Jan-Erik Uth and Rolf Hallin of the Karolinska Institute inserted a catheter with a vibrating balloon into migraine sufferers’ nostrils when a migraine attack began. Volunteers recorded their migraine pain before, during, and after 15 minutes of treatment.
A small pilot study showed promising results: 17 of 18 people reported at least a 50% reduction in pain, compared with 3 of 17 people who received a placebo. Additionally, half of those who received the treatment were completely pain-free 15 minutes after the treatment ended, compared with only 2 people in the placebo group.
In their paper, Jut and Hallin speculate that nasal vibrations target a collection of nerve cells called the sphenopalatine ganglion (SPG). The SPG, located just below the nasal mucosa, is connected to the hypothalamus. During a migraine attack, the hypothalamus is thought to lose control over a collection of structures in the brain called the limbic system, which influences a person’s response to pain. Vibration may help restore control by stimulating the SPG, and indirectly stimulating the hypothalamus.
