Beverly Newman had suffered from migraine headaches since childhood.

“I was probably 10 when it started,” says Newman, 56, a rural Douglas County resident and licensed practical nurse who works at Family Medicine Associates in Lawrence.

“Back then, they didn’t know how to handle them. We lived on a farm, and there were 16 kids in the family, so they just didn’t know. They just knew it was a headache. (Her parents gave her) Bayer aspirin and put me to bed.”

The attacks of intense pain continued into Newman’s adulthood. Sometimes she’d get them twice a month, often for a week at a time.

“I had just learned to live with them. I would go home, put a pillow over my head and just go to bed. And I would still wake up with them the next morning, go back to work, work my normal shift the next day … it would last for days,” Newman recalled. “I would have a throbbing in my left temple — you could actually see the vein bulging there. On a scale of one to 10, it was a 10, pain-wise.”

What’s worse, nothing seemed to help her, not an arsenal of potent painkillers and headache drugs, nor the injections she would receive in the emergency room.

There didn’t seem to be any remedy to Newman’s situation.

Then late last year, her Lawrence neurologist, Dr. John Clark, suggested she try a new approach that had proven successful in helping other migraine sufferers.

Botox — a substance (a poison, actually) more often associated with cosmetic treatments to make the skin look smooth and young.

Beverly Newman once used a variety of treatments, including ice packs, for her migraine pain. Now, she reports Botox treatments have eliminated the headaches that could last for days.

“We started that (a series of Botox shots in the muscles of the head and neck) in December, and I have not had a migraine since. For the first time in my life, I have been migraine-free. It has been heaven,” Newman said.

Common, but underdiagnosed

She’s hardly alone in knowing the ongoing pain of the sharp, throbbing headaches known as migraine.

A study conducted in 1989 and then repeated in 1999 came up with an estimate of about 28 million Americans who live with migraines, according to Dr. Elizabeth Loder, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Another interesting statistic that came out of that study is that one in every four households has someone in it who has migraines.

American Academy of Neurology Foundation, (800) 879-1960 American Council for Headache Education, (856) 423-0258 National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke., (800) 352-9424 National Headache Foundation, (888) NHF-5552 The National Migraine Association Mind Over Migraine The Migraine Relief Center

“It’s very common, but it’s not always recognized. Some of the people who qualified for that diagnosis, if you asked them, would say, ‘Oh, I don’t have migraine, I have sinus headaches,’ or, ‘I don’t have migraine, I have bad tension headaches.’ But, in fact, they do have migraine,” Loder said.

Loder, who also is director of the Pain Management Clinic at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston, regularly treats migraine sufferers.

“That’s pretty much my entire practice. I see people with chronic headaches, and, of course, not everyone with chronic headaches has migraine, but the majority of them do,” she said.

Newman’s doctor, Clark — of Lawrence Neurology Specialists, 330 Ark. — has had a similar experience in his practice.

Beverly Newman leads one of her six horses around a pen on her rural Douglas County farm. Newman suffered from debilitating migraines for years. Recently, a round of Botox injections stopped the migraines. She worked with her horses on Thursday.

How often does he see people with migraines?

“Every day,” Clark said.

They’re usually referred to him by their family doctor or general practitioner. He sees patients newly diagnosed with migraine, as well as those who are suffering headaches and aren’t responding to the typical medications their primary-care doctors have chosen.

Like Newman, many patients have tried medicines such as Imitrex, Zomig, Maxalt and Relpax — all of which are triptans, a family of drugs used as abortive treatments meant to be taken at the onset of migraine.

Other patients have tried Topamax, an anti-seizure medication that the Federal Drug Administration has recently approved as a preventative treatment meant to be taken daily for migraine.

But for some people, like Newman, these mainstays of migraine therapy fail to work.

And that’s where Botox comes in.

Decreases input to brain

It seems unlikely that tiny injections of a poison used to smooth out the appearance of aging on people’s faces also could help reduce the intensity and regularity of migraine.

But it appears that’s what is happening.

Why does it work?

“That’s a good question. It’s being studied, but the theory is that it decreases the external input into the brain stem, which is usually the trigger for the migraines. It’s the trigeminal nerve in the brain stem that we think triggers them,” he said.

Patients like Newman receive injections of 100 units of Botox in the muscles of their head and neck, the beneficial effects of which can last for three or four months.

Clark says the Botox treatments cost $900 to $1,000 in his office and that medical insurance usually covers the expense.

“It’s effective in quite a few people, if nothing else works,” he said

Loder, meanwhile, is withholding judgment on this approach to migraine.

“I don’t think it’s harmful, I’ve participated in some of the trials myself, and it’s not difficult for doctors to learn to do the injections. Most patients don’t find them especially unpleasant, but the jury is still out on exactly what kind of headache they might be useful for and what subset of patients,” she said.

For Newman, though, Botox is the answer to years of suffering from unrelenting pain.

“They (doctors) don’t know why it works, and I don’t care, because it works. They (the headaches) haven’t come back since we started the Botox injections,” she said.

“I just know that, by golly, I’m headache-free. And I’d recommend it to anybody.”