Articles
Writing about chronic migraine, the CGRP era, vestibular migraine, and the things trackers keep getting wrong.
Article · September 17, 2026
Word-finding failure and exhaustion get logged as one 'brain fog' tag. Splitting them shows a neurologist whether a preventive fixed your thinking or only your pain.
Article · September 16, 2026
Most tracking exports log attack dates and pain scores. The three variables a headache specialist actually queries live somewhere else, and you can't add them retroactively.
Article · September 15, 2026
Prodrome to postdrome, one attack can run for days. Most trackers open a form at head pain and close it when the pain stops, which records only the middle third.
Article · September 14, 2026
For a lot of migraineurs the pain isn't the most disabling part of the attack. The postdrome is, and it lands exactly when you're trying to work again.
Article · September 11, 2026
The five-question disability form your neurologist hands you is scored in days of lost function, not headaches. Most trackers close the attack before those days are over.
Article · September 11, 2026
UnitedHealth, CVS Caremark, and Express Scripts have each quietly updated their CGRP formularies. Here is what changed, which tier ubrogepant landed on, and how to use it at your next appointment.
Article · September 10, 2026
Headache-day counting is the unit your diary, your neurologist's intake, and your insurer all run on. It can undercount what an attack actually costs you by three to four times.
Article · September 9, 2026
Trigger logging is an experiment that runs on headache-free days. Past 15 a month, those days are gone. The fix isn't more logging, it's a different question.
Article · September 8, 2026
The attack doesn't land during the stressful week. It lands the moment you relax. The mechanism has a clinical name, and it changes how you should be logging.
Article · September 7, 2026
Every trigger guide watches the 24 hours before an attack. The 24 to 72 hours after are when your threshold drops and the next one gets built.
Article · September 4, 2026
Every tracker hangs your log on headache onset. For headache-absent vestibular migraine, that anchor never fires, and the timeline you hand your neurologist quietly falls apart.
Article · September 3, 2026
For working adults, the head pain is often the smallest slice of a migraine. The fog that follows eats the week, and every tracker records it as a clean day.
Article · September 2, 2026
Every authority answers 'how long does postdrome last' with a population range. Your real number is tighter, personal, and hiding in your own attack log.
Article · September 1, 2026
The attack is the one part of a migraine an app can neatly log. The 24 to 72 hours after it, the part that flattens your week, is where nearly every tracker goes dark.
Article · August 31, 2026
The only preventive that worked is $900 a month, and your insurer just called it 'not medically necessary.' Here's the appeal ladder, step by step.
Article · August 28, 2026
The days of fatigue and brain fog after the pain lifts aren't a comedown you earned. They're postdrome, the migraine's fourth phase, and most trackers ignore them.
Article · August 26, 2026
The pain lifts and the fatigue, brain fog, and residual photophobia stay. Postdrome can outlast the headache. Here's how to move through the 72 hours after and track it when you can barely look at a screen.
Article · August 25, 2026
Medication overuse headache is a recognized diagnosis, and the drugs that stop your attacks can quietly start feeding them. Here is where the line sits and how to see it coming.
Article · August 24, 2026
The label makes it sound like a headache with a spinning chaser. For the already-diagnosed, the dizziness often shows up with no headache at all, on its own clock.
Article · August 21, 2026
For chronic migraineurs, progress rarely means no attacks. It means shorter postdromes and fewer bad days, and those are the numbers worth logging.
Article · August 20, 2026
The postdrome hours are when logging matters most and when your brain can least do it. A field guide to capturing an attack you can barely see.
Article · August 19, 2026
Fail-first protocols make you try and fail older migraine drugs before your insurer covers a CGRP therapy. The game is real, and so is the way out.
Article · August 18, 2026
Migraine ranks second among global causes of disability, yet ADA accommodations get denied every day. The gap isn't the law. It's the evidence.
Article · August 13, 2026
Aura Mode lets you log a full attack at the worst possible moment, no typing required, no squinting at a form, no data lost because the screen hurt too much to look at.
Article · August 12, 2026
CGRP biologics rewired how migraineurs experience their attacks. The tracking tools they rely on were designed for a different era entirely.
Article · August 11, 2026
75% of people with migraine are women. Most tracker apps were built as if that number doesn't exist. Here's what gets missed, and why it matters.
Article · August 10, 2026
Clinical guidelines moved CGRP preventives to first-line. Most step-therapy policies didn't. The gap runs straight through your paperwork, and this week it moved again.
Article · August 7, 2026
The exam room clock isn't your enemy, but an unstructured answer is. Here's how to compress four phases of symptoms into a conversation that fits.
Article · August 6, 2026
A manifesto for building health apps that treat your symptom log as yours: on-device by default, no account, and portable on the way out.
Article · August 5, 2026
Most trackers give aura one checkbox. The clinical literature says the shape, order, and duration of what you see carries far more signal than yes-or-no.
Article · August 4, 2026
Most CGRP prior-auth appeals stop counting at the headache. The 24 to 72 hours of postdrome after it are disabling days your insurer never sees.
Article · August 3, 2026
The fix for tracking burnout is not a better app with more fields. It is logging less, and logging the things your neurologist can actually act on.
Article · July 31, 2026
The privacy question for a migraine tracker isn't what the policy says. It's where your symptom data physically goes, and how many companies touch it on the way.
Article · July 30, 2026
We read what the r/migraine corpus actually says about tracking apps. The pattern: patients log the spike, then get abandoned by every app for the 72 hours that hurt most.
Article · July 29, 2026
A fresh payer policy change puts CGRP access back in the spotlight. Here is what it means for the after-phase your appeal never documents.
Article · July 28, 2026
Self-reported diaries get discounted for recall bias. A tamper-evident export shows your neurologist the data is exactly what your phone recorded, unedited.
Article · July 27, 2026
FMLA and SSDI adjudicators decide on paper, not pain. What a claim-grade migraine record actually contains, and why the postdrome days you skip are the ones that count.
Article · July 24, 2026
Run the real arithmetic on a lifetime with migraine, and the recurring tracking subscription is the one line item designed to compound instead of end.
Article · July 23, 2026
When an insurer denies a CGRP preventive for missing prior-therapy documentation, the appeal turns on evidence you can only build across weeks, not remember in a portal.
Article · July 22, 2026
The headache gets the appointment. The recovery day after it rarely reaches your neurologist's notes. Here is how to put postdrome on the record, with the research to back you.
Article · July 21, 2026
Menstrual and perimenopausal migraineurs get one sex toggle and no cycle-day correlation. What a tracker built around hormonal state would actually show.
Article · July 20, 2026
Leaving a migraine tracker feels like erasing years of attacks. It isn't. Here's why your history is portable, and how to keep the timeline going.
Article · July 19, 2026
Chronic and vestibular migraine tracking sprawls across six apps and a paper journal. Here is what consolidates when a continuous timeline becomes the record.
Article · July 17, 2026
Headache specialists cleared CGRP drugs as first-line care. Most insurer step-therapy protocols still make you fail older, cheaper drugs first. Here is the gap, and what to document.
Article · July 15, 2026
The subscription model charges chronic-migraine patients the most when they are least able to decide. Here is why we chose one price, once.
Article · July 14, 2026
Insurers deny CGRP coverage counting on you to quit. Here is the appeal ladder, stage by stage, and the documentation that overturns a 'not medically necessary.'
Article · July 13, 2026
Most tracking apps end the entry when the pain stops. The 24 to 72 hours after are where the fog, fatigue, and residual light sensitivity actually live, and they belong in the record.
Article · July 10, 2026
Postdrome brain fog hits exactly when logging gets hardest. Voice memos, single-tap capture, and a screen you can actually stand to look at.
Article · July 9, 2026
Trigger correlation is arithmetic that runs on your phone for free. The subscription that gates it after 90 days of your logging is a pricing choice, not a compute cost.
Article · July 8, 2026
The Bárány Society criteria don't require head pain, yet 'no headache means it isn't migraine' keeps sending people to the wrong diagnosis for years.
Article · July 7, 2026
Most people with migraine feel wrecked for a day or more after the pain lifts. Here is how to log the postdrome so your neurologist stops ignoring it.
Article · July 6, 2026
A referral, a six-week wait, then twenty minutes with the specialist. Here is the one page that makes those minutes work harder.
Article · July 5, 2026
You fought prior authorization to get the medication. Then the app tracking your response locked your own history behind a renewing subscription. That is the second paywall.
Article · July 5, 2026
Insurance, disability, trials, triggers, treatment, appointment prep, awareness: each reason demands a different data shape, and most apps build for the easiest.
Article · July 5, 2026
Insurers make most CGRP patients fail older preventives first. The step-therapy exception process exists to skip that, and almost nobody files it.
Article · July 5, 2026
An Explanation of Benefits is not a bill. Here is how to read the columns, decode the denial codes, and tell which number you actually owe after a CGRP claim.
Tool · June 12, 2026
The denial says step therapy. Our free letter builder maps your preventive history and migraine-day count onto the criteria a reviewer actually checks.
Article · June 5, 2026
Most vestibular migraine attacks bring no headache, so clinicians who pattern-match migraine to head pain filter these patients straight into a years-long diagnostic odyssey.
Article · May 6, 2026
A practical script for the appointment: how to describe postdrome symptoms quickly, what to ask about treatment, and the line that gets the conversation past acute migraine and into the days after.
Article · May 5, 2026
The day after a migraine, you should be fine. Your manager said so. Your headache eased. The literature says you're not fine, and there's a name for it.
Article · May 1, 2026
If your migraines don't end, your tracker doesn't know what to do with you. The data model in every major incumbent assumes a discrete attack with a start time and an end time. The chronic and vestibular cohort, roughly 5.5 million Americans, has been excluded from category tooling for fifteen years by a schema choice nobody calls a schema choice.
Article · May 1, 2026
The 24-72 hour migraine after-phase is documented in clinical literature, named by the people who live it, and tracked by zero major incumbents as a first-class entity. The category fails it in four predictable shapes, and the gap is wider than the rest of the design choices put together.