CURRY MAY BE good for migraine. How could we not be cheered by this breaking medical news story? All we need to hear now is that chocolate digestives play a significant role in the management of back pain and that nothing quite so efficiently fortifies the immune system as a fun-size tub of sour cream and chive flavoured Pringles.

Had I known that the Rowett Research Institute in Scotland was studying the potentially ameliorative effects of curry on migraine, I might have attempted to get on to the project as a guinea-pig. I am, after all, slap bang in the target area: I like curry and I get migraines.

Also, like most migraine sufferers, I would try anything. I once, in desperation, signed up for a pricey course of spine realignment under the hands, and indeed knees, of a suspiciously underqualified chiropractor from the Netherlands. Our relationship ended abruptly when I developed a random migraine while face-down on her table.

But I never tried curry. Incidentally, I’m not talking about just any old migraines. I get cluster headaches, a sub-group of the migraine family and widely agreed by headache connoisseurs to be the mother and father of all headaches, the alpha and omega of periodic head pain.

In America cluster headaches are referred to as “suicide headaches”. During a attack, one of your eyes turns bloodshot and streams, your nose runs and you experience an agonising pain in the temple and behind the eye as if someone in grubby overalls has got in there and is tightening important parts of the inside of your head in a metalwork vice, just for a laugh.

It’s quite a party. Sufferers from migraine in the lower leagues tend to want to lie in a darkened room. Those of us in the headache Premiership, on the contrary, cannot sit still during an attack, and need to pace up and down, clutching the affected area and sometimes moaning and weeping.

Some sufferers, in extremis, will bang their heads against the wall. I think it was Oliver Sacks who pointed out that, to the cluster headache sufferer, the news that his condition is not life-threatening comes as something of a “mixed blessing”. The general assumption is that cluster headaches and all other kinds of migraine are triggered by something, normally “stress” — a term that used to indicate some form of trauma but that has broadened in our time to the point where it now means, simply “having to do something”. A long and distinguished history of cluster headaches, however, very soon immunises one to straightforward theories of cause and effect.

I’ve had them happy, I’ve had them sad — on cheese, and off. I’ve had them when my football team were relegated. But I’ve also had them when my football team were champions. I’ve had them when “stressed”. But I’ve also had them as a student. And so on. Pending further scientific brilliance, the only convincing explanation for migraine appears to be the theory of inherited predisposition. In other words, people get migraines because they get migraines.

Fortunately, control of cluster headaches can be achieved in some cases by carpet bombing them with calcium channel blockers and (for the occasional attack that gets under the heart drug’s radar) a nasal spray so noxious that it could stop a galloping horse. Nevertheless, the thought that one could exchange this faintly worrying cocktail of factory-built chemicals for a chicken dansak with a side order of spicy poppadums has a certain appeal.

It may be more complicated than it sounds, though. Round my way, you can wait anything up to 40 minutes to have a curry delivered, especially on a Friday, when the outlets are at their busiest. Given that the key to the control of any kind of headache, and especially migraine, is early intervention, this may not be ideal.

Also, what about those times when a portion of lamb sag doesn’t seem entirely appealing, such as at 9.30am or when one has just eaten? It may be that salicylic acid (a component of aspirin, but excitingly demonstrated, in this new research, to be present in hot curries) is, in the end, more efficiently taken in tablet form.

Nice thought, though. Researchers and patients alike, we’re all hoping for the time, post Mary Poppins, when the spoonful of sugar doesn’t merely help the medicine go down, but formally replaces it, in the most delightful way. Hope on.

Times Recommends

• It’s the beginning of the affair
• Afghanistan: still a price worth paying
• Heroes of the downtrodden