We have secretly replaced Mo's milk with Folger's crystals..

When Grandin was eighteen years old she was inspired by a cattle squeeze chute to develop her own pressure relief for autistic people called the "hug machine."  She actually got in the cattle chute to help her visually and physically observe how she could better configure this chute for both animals and humans.  She said within five seconds of being in the squeeze she felt a wave of relaxation and thirty minutes later when she got out of it she had felt all her anxieties disappear and felt a calmness she had never experienced before.  After years of adjustments, Grandin had finally successfully completed the "hug box" to how she anticipated it being.  This box created a deep pressure stimulation evenly across the lateral parts of the body and was able to increase or decrease the amounts of pressure the individual desired (Edelson, 1996).  Grandin's hug box is now widely used as a therapy method to help an autistic child's sensory problems.  Research has been done on her squeeze machine and significant results have been shown that children who use it for at least five minutes a day were significantly calmer and could produce better motor responses than those children who did not use the squeeze machine (Grandin, Thinking In Pictures).

I have read articles in which holding therapy is spoken of in the same breath as Temple Grandin's squeeze machine. To me this seems baffling. The whole point of the squeeze machine is that it allows a person with autism to explore touch and deep pressure in a way which is completely under their control. Grandin writes:

Being able to control the devise is very important. I had to be able to stop the stimulation when it became too intense. When people hugged me, I stiffened and pulled away to avoid the all-engulfing tidal wave of stimulation . . . Lately there has been a lot of publicity about holding therapy, where an autistic child is forcibly held and hugged until he stops resisting. If this had been done to me, I would have found it highly aversive and stressful.

"The one constant in weather-triggered migraines is change," Bigal says in a news release. "We're realizing more and more that change -- or fluctuation -- is a major factor in migraine triggers, whether it's change in sleep patterns, estrogen levels, or weather."

Different kinds of weather change affected different patients:

* 34% were sensitive to a change in temperature or humidity.
* 14% were sensitive to a changing weather pattern.
* 13% were sensitive to extremes of and/or a change in barometric
pressure.
* 10% were sensitive to more than one type of weather change.

What's going on?

"The brains of migraine sufferers are extremely sensitive, and stimulation that has no effect on most people can trigger migraines in those prone to them," Bigal says.

An approaching storm may prompt many to reach for an umbrella, but for migraine sufferers, those clouds may mean it's time to reach for a bottle of aspirin.

Storm fronts, and the barometric pressure changes that go along with them, have long been associated with migraine headaches, though it's not clearly understood why. In fact, migraines themselves, though clearly prevalent, are not fully understood by doctors.

According to the American Academy of Family Physicians, migraine headaches appear to be linked in part to changes in levels of the chemical serotonin in the body. When serotonin levels are high, blood vessels constrict. But when they are low, blood vessels may swell, and that swelling may cause migraine pain.

Some speculate that barometric pressure changes may contribute to the blood vessel swelling and explain why many people report migraines with changes in both weather or altitude.