martin
Sorry this is a bit late, but I just came across this forum. Seeing that a few posts touched on brain trauma, I thought I'd share my own experience with concussions and screen sensitivity in case it's helpful to anyone putting the pieces together.
I had a series of small concussions in 2014, triggered (I believe) by a more severe brain trauma from 2009 involving hitting my head with a large iron pipe (long story 🙂. After the 2014 incidents, I began noticing severe sensitivity to my Mac screens, and have had near-daily migraines for the past 4 years. (Unlike a lot of you, I'm not a programmer, but I am a translator and editor, so working with text on computers is an unavoidable part of my daily life.)
Since I never considered that screens or screen-flicker was the primary culprit for my migraines, I spent a lot of time trying various concussion treatments. The ones that have been the most helpful have been:
(1) dietary changes (cutting "inflammatory" food like dairy & gluten, cutting back to 1 coffee a day).
(2) Applying ice at the onset of a migraine (this took me 3 years to figure out and was an enormously helpful change, far better than any pharmaceutical. The "Headache Hat" is a really wonderful product for applying ice. I own 3 of them.)
(3) Breathing exercises (using an app called Kardia that you can set to regulate your breathing to have longer breaths outward. Really recommend this).
(4) Craniosacral massage. (This one is really weird and scientifically dubious, and I remain skeptical of it, but countless concussion patients swear by it, and I have to admit that I feel a noticeable improvement in my migraine frequency for the first 2 weeks after a session).
(5) I did Brock string exercises for about 6 months, but I couldn't gauge whether they were helping or hurting . . . half the time, it seemed like they triggered my eyestrain rather than strengthening my eyes
All of this progress, however, can be quickly obliterated by a long bout of working in front of a computer screen——which is why I'm really glad I stumbled across this forum. Sometimes I even wonder if my migraines are entirely unrelated to the brain trauma, and are exclusively a product of screen sensitivity. Nevertheless, I think some of these treatments from the concussion field could help alleviate migraine symptoms more generally and are worth investigating.
I have a lot of personal observations that dovetail with things you all have pointed out. For example, I always thought my symptoms worsened after getting new glasses that have anti-glare coating. I certainly never had any screen sensitivity prior to 2014 (when I first bought a computer with the much-maligned Intel drivers). Happy to keep sharing if anyone finds this info helpful!