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Headache specialists have tested a technique called occipital nerve stimulation on people with cluster headache with positive results. Cluster headache is one of the worst headaches you can experience and luckily most of us will never know what they're like. It's severe pain on one side of the head usually involving the eye lasting up to two three hours and come in runs several times a day for days, weeks and sometimes years - occasionally with no respite. While there are medications which can help, they fail a proportion of people. Stimulation of deep structures in the brain can work but that's risky. Headache specialists have tested a relatively new technique called occipital nerve stimulation using implanted electrodes attached to a little generator. The occipital nerves run up the back of your skull from the neck - one on each side. This 20 month long trial was small - involving eight people with intractable cluster headache for whom drugs and indeed other surgery hadn't helped. Occipital nerve stimulation benefited six of them. It took weeks and months to gain maximum effect and although no-one ended up pain free some managed to reduce their medications and had significant reductions in pain. The next step should be a bigger and randomised trial to make sure it's not a placebo effect.
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