journal features

green medicine

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2017.11.07

Tonight I am doing a Canadian first: participating in a University of Arizona study into whether green light can prevent migraines. As I've documented in this journal dozens of times, I've been plagued with severe migraines since I was five. They've been particularly bad this year, with this past month being easily the worst of my life for the number of severe migraines.

So I'm once again doing something about.

This time, it's a 70 day trial in which I spend the last two hours of the day in a dark room illuminated only by green LED's. The lights - and the instructions - were provided by University staff under doctor Mohab Ibrahim (MD., Ph.D) an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Anesthesiology and Pharmacology at the

Banner-University Medical Center at the University of Arizona.

I'm told that the preliminary results have been very encouraging. That's more than good enough for me, I'll try anything - I've had my brain scanned, run a test with bubbly water injected into my heart, I've been on a food-avoidance diet for decades, and I've even put myself on daily doses of ridiculous preventative drugs that made me an error-prone zombie.

The doctors in Arizona are looking for more study participants, so if you get migraines and you're in the US or Canada, contact me and I'll put you in touch.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)