The Bad Trip: Migraine

It's 4.30 am. Several hours of sleep are terminated by an internal projector screening trauma-tinged scenes from the previous day. I am unable to turn it off; this is not a good sign. More ominous still is the vague but unmistakeable gnawing indigestion in the pit of my stomach. I consider medication but am uncertain, and can't be bothered anyway. I turn over and attempt to banish the discomfort by conscious relaxation.

Two hours later, Martha gets up. I inform her that I am suffering from a semi-migraine. It's not long before 'semi' can be removed from the equation. A headache has moved into a familiar spot to the right of my temples, and the nausea has intensified. The outside world begins to shut down, and I am plunged into an interior cinemascape of vivid fantasies: a procession of people from the distant past, sexual images dating back forty years. They eventually fade away, leaving me in a dark, still space, painful and exhausting. The headache is less severe than sometimes - I do not need to groan in anguish. The nausea is more problematic, however, and I feel afraid. I know the pattern. I shall not be free of the pain until the entire process has played itself out completely.

Seven hours later, I am retching from deep inside my intestines. 'Please come out' I implore, as the slowly growing but obstinate clenching sensations refuse to reach their conclusion. The earlier phases, hours before, are easy to handle, coming from the stomach proper. Each successive series of convulsions emanates from a deeper point, however, and nothing can stop it. I try to relax and stay quiet in bed, but this is not always the best thing. The sound of Martha walking downstairs is enough to disturb my false equilibrium and bring on another session of necessary retching. Once the final bodyquake has issued from a spot way below the belly button I recognise the signs immediately, and can once more look forward to a future.

For mild migraines, a medicine called Migraleve can relieve the symptoms. Working in classic symptomatic medicine style, it contains painkiller for the headache and an anti-nausea ingredient for the gut. I also have a pill entitled Sumatriptan. If taken in time, it is like magic, cutting off the symptoms and permitting me to go to work, climb a hill, or whatever. I am not fond of Sumatriptan, however, and use it sparingly. Sumatriptan works by narrowing the blood vessels which dilate during a migraine through the agent of serotonin. It can leave me with a muddy feeling the day after, as if a mysterious but necessary psycho-physical process has been artificially cut off. Temporary relief, but no guarantee that it is beneficial in the longer term. In contrast, a migraine allowed to run its course may leave me feeling light, purified, and refreshed.

It is fair to say that, behind its armoury of medications, orthodox medicine does not understand what migraine is at all. It can wax lyrical about symptoms and dealing with the effects, but that is all. It is strange for ones life to be overwhelmed from time-to-time by a condition which root is unknown, but you get to live with the fact. My own experience over almost two decades points to migraine being a disturbance in the energy field, but this is not the kind of statement that has conventional medical researchers jumping up and down with excitement. There is probably somebody out there - in a village in the depths of the Amazon rainforest maybe, or deeply versed in the arts of acupuncture - who actually knows. My own task is simply to become more proactive, and discover what is out there in the first place.

Coming Out

(The photo is of James Delingpole, blogger extraordinaire. His writings, along with the copious links contained therein, are probably the best source of information on the subject I write about below. His is a blog for the Daily Telegraph - an unlikely resource for Pale Green Vortex, it may be thought. But a voice of truth cannot be ignored, whatever its origin.....)

'Coming out' is a term once the preserve of homosexuals. To come out required considerable courage, putting at risk relationships with family and friends, endangering chances of success in the workplace, and invoking the spectre of social estrangement and hostility, violence even, from those who regarded your position as wrong, wicked or sinful.

Today, a new object has emerged as the butt of a blind prejudice which, in some circles at least, seems deemed acceptable. This is the Human-Made (Anthropogenic) Global Warming sceptic - AGW sceptic for short. Think I'm exaggerating? Ask Peter Taylor, subject to vicious ad hominem attacks from former colleagues in Greenpeace and the like, following his work questioning the validity of the AGW theory (and, remember, it is a theory, a hypothesis, not a proven fact). Ask David Bellamy. Ask a host of scientists who have in essence put their livelihood at risk by daring to question the received wisdom of AGW. No manner of insult, abuse, half-truth, lies, and attempt at suppression, is out-of-court in dealing with these renegade and extremely dangerous individuals. It often falls to retired members of the scientific community - no longer needing to toe the line in order to get funding for their work - to blow the whistle on the pseudo and false science that fuels the AGW juggernaut.

The nasty side of the AGW camp really came out in the recent scandal surounding the 10:10 snuff movie. 10:10 is a movement aiming at reducing our carbon footprint by 10% every year. In a nutshell, its video nasty (involving such luminaries as Richard Curtis of 'Love Actually' fame, Gillian 'X Files' Anderson, and members of Tottenham Hotspur football club) portrays sceptics getting gorily blown to pieces for their doubts. Remarkably, this was intended to be rather funny, which in itself says something about the mindset behind it all. Think for a moment. Could a similar movie be made and purport to be a jolly laugh if, instead of AGW sceptics, it was blowing up Jews? Or members of the Taleban? Or homosexuals? I think not.

Another giveaway to the dark side of the Warmist agenda is the appelation given to those who dare to disagree. They are termed 'deniers'. Ring any bells?

So I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and hereby declare myself an AGW sceptic. After a fair bit of weighing up the evidence, and while not doubting that human activity must have some effect on global climate, I seriously question the claim of its overriding significance.

My own credentials for taking such a stand are not so hopeless. I undertook some study of the theoretical mechanics of human activity's influence on climate at Oxford University during the 1970s, decades before the topic hit the mainstream. More recently, I was one of those who read James Lovelock's apocalyptic 'Revenge of Gaia' and began to get worried. However, as the years have passed, I have come to see how economic, political, and academic power-and-money agendas have usurped the cause, twisting the matter beyond belief. The result has been the birth of a new religion, Warmism. And, as often happens with religion, it is built on shaky ground. In this case, the belief of the faithful is based on dodgy, selective and sometimes manipulated statistics; amateurish computer models; and an ideology that, ironically, is rather life-hating.

The philosophical paradox is that these so-called environmentalists fail to see the greater environment at all. They are a cross between Old Testament believers, seeing humanity as the centre of everything, and pre-Galileo scientists, who missed the bigger environmental picture altogether, and the greater significance of that huge golden mass around which our little Earth circles. Psychologically, the cult of AGW feeds on a sense of the innate wickedness of human activity, which in turn has its roots in the doctrine of Original Sin. Financially, AGW is the fraud and scam of the age, meaning big bucks for the few and higher taxes for the masses. And politically it is an excuse for further fear-mongering to justify more interfering with peoples' lives and eroding any remaining vestiges of democracy.

More to be said, more to be said.........