My name is Ryan Garver. I’ve had migraine headaches for most of my life and struggled to manage them. Lysalgos is a starting place for me to find control over an illness that many struggle to manage.
I’ve been fortunate in the amount of support from my family through much of my life. My mom and sister both suffer from migraine headaches. More broadly, chronic pain is something that I’ve seen my family deal with and the parallels between finding a treatment that works for managing chronic back pain, for example, and migraines is uncanny.
Having seen so many loved ones struggle with this common problem that it became clear to me that there isn’t a great solution that allows individuals and their doctors to monitor symptoms and track how they respond to various treatments over the long term in real life. The improvement gained from a single supplement or drug may be subtle, but layered with other simultaneous treatments you may make large improvements in quality of life.
If you read medical journals or even news articles about double blind studies for a new drug or comparing melatonin to a placebo it can seem like if you can just do some tests on yourself you’ll see some of those big gains. But here’s the dirty secret. Those tests are controlled and monitored closely and require careful statistical analysis after the fact to know what worked and what didn’t. If we aren’t applying even the most basic data analysis to ourselves then there isn’t much hope for replicating even the most marginal improvments.
At Lysalgos we are working to improve this situation. We are building a diary tool specifically designed to help chronic pain sufferers develop a stronger understanding of their triggers and the effectiveness of their treatment. This is a big project but we think the impact could be much bigger.
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