Gibberish

By now, most of you will have seen this [YouTube], it's LA reporter Serene Branson fumbling over her words while introducing an award ceremony on live national news. If you haven't, it's extremely funny, watch it.

Now let's go into depth... I'm quite annoyed at the media attention that this got. Everyone seems to be in one of two camps: the ones who don't realise it's medical and simply find it funny, and the ones who have realised there was a medical reason and are now assuming that she had a stroke, or something far more serious. Take it from me - she was having a migraine. Being a migraine sufferer myself, I know quite a lot about them.

Actual migraines only affect around 1 in 8 people and the vast majority of people claiming to have a 'migraine' are actually just having a bad headache. It's similar to the way that people walking around complaining of flu actually just have a bad cold, they've just never had real flu so they don't have anything to compare it with. So because the majority of people have never had a migraine, there's this common misconception that they're simply bad headaches, which simply isn't true. Migraine sufferers experience loss of vision, loss of feeling down one side of the body, inability to speak, inability to concentrate and increased sensitivity to light or sound, and that's in addition to a sometimes crippling headache. The symptoms are very similar to those of a stroke, apart from the fact that the sufferer normally recovers completely with little or no medical attention.

But while I am slightly annoyed at the complete lack of knowledge that supposedly well-researched news coverage, as well as the general public, seems to have about a common yet potentially disabling condition, I'm somewhat glad that something like this has happened in the mass media. Maybe a few more people will start to understand from now on that migraines aren't just bad headaches.