Helmet Headache

[zellerzone]

I've never been interested in football. To me it's just a long, drawn-
out session of hurry-up-and-wait. Part of my lack of interest stems
from the fact the players wear oversized plastic helmets instead of
the snug leather ones they wore in the twenties thirties and forties.
It always seemed to me that one of those things might be interesting
to wear.

I don't get headaches. I haven't had one in thirty years. Every time I
feel one coming on, the blood circulation in my head adjusts itself
and I feel fine. But, when I was a kid, I got headaches all the time.
What if not getting headaches is a bad thing?

I lied in that last paragraph. I do get headaches. I get them from
wearing the kind of close-fitting headgear I've described elsewhere.
The headache goes away the moment I take it off.

"Let’s face it ladies–you may have been told to act like you’ve been
there before, but you haven’t. Even if you wore 7 piece pads for
Halloween one year, nothing prepares you for that first helmet
headache (hey, that’s how you know it fits)".

" Helmet headache is a symptom of the skull adjusting to the
helmet. This headache could last up to two weeks. If the headache
persists over two weeks, then helmet adjustments need to be made."

"External compression headache is an infrequently cited cranial
neuralgia resulting from continued stimulation of the cutaneous nerves
caused by the application of pressure over the forehead or scalp. The
headache can result from wearing a tight band around the head, a tight
hat, or sports goggles, for example. The diagnostic criteria include a
constant nonpulsating head pain felt in the area subjected to pressure
that increases over minutes, is not associated with other symptoms,
and often disappears within 1 hour after removing the causative
stimulus. If the causative stimulus is prolonged, external compression
can lead to a more severe, migrainous headache or to a full-blown
migraine attack in predisposed patients. This is a primary-type
headache, not associated with organic cranial or intracranial disease,
and thus does not require further investigation when the diagnostic
criteria are fulfilled and the intermittent presentation is clear."

"With external compression headaches, the solution is as obvious as
the cause. Simply remove the head wear causing the pressure."

(found in various web sites)

Maybe deliberately inducing headaches is the reason I never get them
spontaneously.

[Allen Nelson]

(I heard a news story about this. Possibly this is what's happening when I induce a helmet headache)

Ischemic preconditioning

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ischemic preconditioning
Intervention
MeSH	D019194

Ischemic preconditioning (IPC) an experimental technique^{[citation needed]} for producing resistance to the loss of blood supply and, thus oxygen, to tissues of many types. IPC is an intrinsic process whereby repeated short episodes of ischaemia protect the myocardium against a subsequent ischaemic insult. It was first identified in 1986 by Murry et al. this group exposed anesthetised open-chest dogs to four periods of 5 min coronary artery occlusions followed by a 5 minute period of reperfusion before the onset of a 40 minute sustained occlusion of the coronary artery. The control animals had no such period of “ischaemic preconditioning” and had much larger infarct sizes compared with the dogs that did.^[1] The exact molecular pathways behind this phenomenon have yet to be fully understood.

[zellerzone]

The story I heard was that Ischemic preconditioning works even when the blood supply is cut off to something unrelated. For instance, if a blood-pressure cuff is inflated on a patient's arm and left that way for a minute or so, it will help prevent damage to the heart during a heart attack. Might it not also help prevent brain damage from strokes?

[zellerzone]

The old helmets were beautifully made shoes for the skull.

[zellerzone]

The vise-like head-holding device of Dr. Zubek's immobilization box must have induced quite a headache.

[zellerzone]

There's been some discussion that football helmets are dangerous
because
they create a false sense of security. -that players tend to use their
helmets as weapons, thinking there'll be no consequences. Sort of like
the people in those dorky helmets that look like they're wearing a
duck
on their head who ride their bicycles in the middle of traffic. Hey!
I'm
wearing a helmet! I'm invincible!

They're finding that retired football players tend to suffer early
dementia due to all those blows to the head.

Maybe if former players periodically wore their old helmets long
enough
to get a headache it would help protect their brains. It couldn't
hurt.
Well, all right, it would hurt, but only until they took the helmet
off.