Is the $7,000 migraine drug really worth it?
Ladies, you’re being targeted.
If you’ve got migraines, Big Pharma is hoping you’ll treat its newest drug like the latest iPhone.
It wants you to be first in line to try it out… and then brag about it to all your friends.
It’s even like an iPhone in another way: At $575 per monthly shot, a single dose of this med costs about as much as the latest model with all the bells and whistles.
But don’t grab your sleeping bag and camp out in front of the pharmacy for erenumab
(Aimovig) just yet.
Much like an iPhone, this “first” could leave you with some serious buyer’s remorse!
Low chance of success
I get why people are desperate for new migraine meds.
The pain’s intense, the options feel limited, and the drugs that are out there right now absolutely stink.
Once the side effects kick in, many women quit taking their meds.
They’d rather have the headaches!
The new drug claims to offer another option for all the women battling these headaches who don’t get much (or any) relief from the drugs on the market now.
And for the low, low price of nearly $7,000 a year – possibly not yet covered by insurance – you might be one of the lucky few to benefit.
One key measure of success in a migraine drug is that it cuts the number of “headache days” by at least half.
In studies behind this drug, the fraction of patients to get that basic benefit was… drumroll please… less than a third!
Just 30 percent got that big reduction in headaches, which means a full 7 out of 10 patients on the drug DIDN’T see that benefit (but were certainly facing a risk of nasty side effects, including pufferfish skin problems at the injection site and the agony of constipation).
That already sounds bad, right?
Hang with me here.
It’s worse!
Like any decent study, this one had folks on a placebo, and 13.7 percent of them also had an improvement of at least 50 percent.
That means that the REAL “benefit” of the drugs isn’t 30 percent.
It’s in just 16 percent of patients. If you give this drug to 100 migraine patients, just 16 will get a benefit we can attribute directly to the medication.
Here’s another way of looking at it: 5 out of 6 people who take are risking side effects for NO benefit!
If there were no OTHER possible treatments for migraines, I could certainly understand the temptation… especially if it were (mostly) covered by insurance.
But there ARE other treatments… and most of the people given migraine drugs have never tried them because they’ve never been TOLD about them.
The first and best treatment is to look at possible food allergies, the single most common migraine trigger.
Even if most docs won’t admit it yet.
How can they? They’ll run an extremely superficial panel of tests that show most people aren’t allergic to anything, point to the very official-looking results and say, “See? Not an allergy.”
What they WON’T tell you is that most common food sensitivities aren’t detected by those tests.
Try an elimination diet instead, especially targeting dairy, soy, sugar, caffeine, nuts, gluten, and common food additives including flavor agents, colorings, preservatives, MSG, and aspartame..
If that doesn’t do the trick, try a B complex with folic acid, B6, and B12, which can cut migraine pain, frequency, and disability without the risk of these medications.
