On Hope, or a Reasonable Facsimile Thereof

Today I've got the sort of migraine that makes you want to break things, so let's talk about that, shall we? I assume you know me well enough by now to know there will be diversions along the way, and that they'll sort of end up being the point to the extent that there is ever any damned point to any of this.

I took 300 mgs of imitrex a couple hours ago, and needless to say it's not helping much. I'm aware that 300 mgs of Imitrex falls into the category of "Simple Retirement Plans, Involving Oak Boxes", but there are moments when it doesn't seem like that big a drawback, assuming I don't get reincarnated with the headaches and end up like that otter on my sidebar. I've also taken three Tylenol and 50 mgs of Promethazine, which is an anti-nausea agent, because combining them sometimes helps.

I first took Imitrex ten years ago, it was the first triptan drug we tried after realizing that the ergotamines didn't even rise to the level of placebo for me. It never worked too well and it didn't even not-work-very-well for very long and within two years I was onto Maxalt. I'm cycling through them all again, having used and discarded each of the available triptans without a good deal of success. I'm going through them faster this time, but with luck, and with the new preventative regimen, I might be able to hold out for another five years and we'll hope that they come up with something new before that ticks out.

In the meantime, and for the last several years, I've been using a variety of things which logically have no chance of doing anything useful, and which I know don't help, but then, you could say the same thing about the Imitrex, which actually is supposed to help. Compared to Imitrex, which is about fifteen dollars a pill to my insurance company and five bucks a pill to me, topical mint oils and gel patches and Bach Flower Remedies and homeopathic migraine pills and mint gum and sour candies and cold compresses and icy water and aromatherapy and cucumber peels and blue ribbons and a variety of folk magics are at least cheaper as they don't work at all.

Right now, on the desk beside me, I have three tubes of Head-On. The company claims the useful ingredient is white bryony, which is an herbal preparation often used for headaches, though in my experience it doesn't do much more than, say, Amerge. But the actual active ingredient is menthol. Menthol is about three quarters of what makes Vapo Rub smell like that, and what it does is provide a cooling sensation by aiding evaporation, something like that. Personally, I don't care if the company claims that it works because an endangered species once peed in the stream that runs by the parking lot of the place where the guy who invented it used to buy his soybeans. The fact is, it's a convenient topical menthol in a container that doesn't "look like a test tube", and is therefore unlikely to get me subjected to additional scrutiny at security checkpoints in airports and government buildings.

Does it work? About as well as a cold washcloth, or indeed the old folk magic remedy cucumber peels, which works on the same principle--something cold on your forehead. But it's easier to carry around, and it's pretty cheap compared to the fifteen dollar roll-on bottle of mint oil and gunk I got at Crabtree and Evelyn, or the ten dollar tubes of cream from Earth Therapeutics that turn runny after a few months, and the ten dollar spray bottles from Nature Well, and the ten dollar roll on tubes of MigraStick you find at health food stores in which the oil turns brown after a few months, and which as I mentioned, "look like test tubes".

Why do I bring this up? Partly to bitch, and partly because I'm angry. I read a bunch of blogs, where I don't always comment because I tend to not enjoy having my ass rhetorically stomped by people who are smarter than me or better at arguing than me, but it doesn't mean I haven't still got things I'd like to say. So, anyone who's reading this has probably already spotted the blog and the comment in question, and has now put two and two together, because, let's face it, I'm outclassed by my own commenters, too. So we're not going to go back to that, but I'm just going to see if I can make a couple of points here.

It's easy to look at people who buy Head-On as fools, since the active ingredients don't really do anything, and are at homeopathic levels of dilution anyway. Clearly these people are throwing their money away, and are stupid, and are to be regarded as suckers. And by that same token, people who buy lottery tickets are suckers, too, especially if they're poor. If you know it's not going to help you, why are you throwing your money away? There are, after all, some people you just can't help.

The thing is, you go in for the lottery tickets, and the Head-On, when there's nothing else that *can* help you. It's very easy to discount the power of desperation. If you're poor, in this country, you have to be aware that you're very likely to always *be* poor. If you're working poor, you're already working as hard and as long as you possibly can, and statistically and practically, you will never be any closer to The American Dream than you are now. The only financial mobility you can reasonably expect, in fact, is downward.

Your chances of winning the lottery are virtually nil. But they're still the best chance you have.

I've never been that poor by necessity. When I haven't had somewhere to live, it's been by choice. But I've worked with an awful lot of people who are, and I've watched them buy lottery tickets, and tried to argue them out of it. Eventually, I figured out that these were people who were buying hope to dull their desperation, and who's to say that's not a good use of their money? It's the same thing I do every time I buy another box of B&T Headache Relief or grapefruit aromatherapy oil, or for that matter refill my Imitrex. Who am I to call them suckers?

If there's someone to blame for this, it's the system that keeps poor people poor no matter how hard they work. Anything else, it seems to me, is blaming the victim through a complete ignorance of the nature of desperation.

That said, I'm going to go take a hot bath with lavender gel, and there's no logical reason for that to work either, but there's really nothing else that will work any better. Sometimes, all you can have is a workable placebo, or a little false hope.