IllogiNews:Headaches are good for you, scientists find
This article is part of IllogiNews, your sauce for chips and sausages. |
In a massive breakthrough announced last Tuesday, scientists have discovered that headaches are actually extremely beneficial.
In related news, the FDA has announced a ban on the sale of all OTC headache remedies, on the grounds that anything that interferes with a headache is detrimental to the nation's health.
And in yet another response to the discovery, the U.S. Army has instituted a policy of bashing new recruits repeatedly on the top of the head with a lightly padded 12 pound sledge hammer. Initial reports from Fort Jackson, where the program was first tested out, have been extremely positive. The only reported drawback has been the need for an unusual number of extra-large hats to accommodate the recruit's subsequently much wider (but flatter) heads.
"We've been bothered by this whole headache thing for years," explained Professor Fooblesnit of Arkham Polytechnic Institute (currently on leave pending the outcome of the Committee on Academic Performance's investigation into the collection of mushrooms discovered in his office last summer). "After nearly a billion years of evolution -- or a bit less, if you assume only creatures that have evolved heads can actually have headaches -- you would think that we would have lost our ability to have headaches. Unless, of course, they are good for something! The evolutionary dilution principle requires this!"
Doctor Nikola Sodwit, chief reshelver at the Alexandria Library, adds that the major religions of he world have also been puzzled by headaches for at least the last few centuries. No religious book mentions them, and there's no clear understanding of why God might have given them to us. But if they're nothing but an annoyance, the common understanding that everything happens for a reason leads directly to the conclusion that there's no such thing as a headache, which is apparently not true.
One school of thought says humans were actually created on a Monday, and God was hung over. (Another school of thought holds that God is just a misanthrope.)
But all such arguments have finally been relegated to the past, along with questions about the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin (without giving the pin a headache). Because we now know headaches are good for you!
First and foremost, they raise the forward pain threshold, which means everything hurts less in the future if you have lots of headaches today. Second, the pounding pain of a really first-rate migraine can cause the release of endorphins, which have valuable anti-inflammatory properties. According to Professor Fooblesnit's "hammer studies" (conducted on grad students, who have since unionized), headaches also improve long term cognition (or at any rate they increase long term skepticism regarding the terms of employment of short term jobs, which is nearly the same thing).
Professor Fooblesnit was about to tell us more about what headaches are truly good for, but he was unexpectedly called away to a conference having to do with mushrooms.