The world's most painful condition demands urgent action
Help us accelerate access to effective treatments for "suicide headaches"
About cluster headache
Cluster headache ("suicide headache") is often considered the most painful medical condition. Patients rate it as significantly more painful than childbirth, kidney stones, gunshot wounds, and bone fractures. Standard painkillers don't help.
Tension Headache: 2.5/10
Mild to moderate dull, aching pain that feels like a tight band around the head. Usually manageable with over-the-counter pain relievers.
Even in wealthy nations with advanced healthcare, hundreds of thousands still experience torture-like suffering every year. About 50% of all patients have contemplated suicide. At the same time, global funding for cluster headache is virtually nonexistent. This crisis cannot go on any longer.
Effective treatments exist
Several treatments have shown remarkable effectiveness against cluster headache, but an alarming fraction of patients struggle to access them.
High-flow oxygen can abort attacks within minutes and is officially recommended by major medical guidelines. Yet even this safe, legal treatment remains difficult for many patients to access due to prescription barriers, insurance gaps, and lack of awareness among doctors.
Psychedelics of the indoleamine family (including psilocybin, LSD, DMT, and 5-MeO-DALT) have shown some of the most impressive results, with 70–80% of surveyed users reporting significant relief. Often, low, sub-hallucinogenic doses are sufficient to prevent entire clusters or stop attacks acutely, with minimal side effects. Similarly, the non-hallucinogenic compound BOL-148 (a derivative of LSD) has shown remarkable efficacy in early research, yet it remains unavailable due to a lack of funding for larger trials.
Many of these treatments remain out of reach for most patients: whether due to legal restrictions, regulatory delays, lack of medical recognition, or simply because patients and doctors don't know about them. Given the severity of the pain, this is analogous to refusing anesthesia to patients during surgery. This is absolutely unacceptable.
We need your help to accelerate access to effective treatments.
Treating Cluster Headaches with Psychedelics
DMT for Cluster Headaches: Aborting and Preventing Extreme Pain with Tryptamines and Other Methods
Take these three steps
Sign the global letter to demand governments and agencies take action now. Anyone anywhere can sign.
After signing the global letter, sign your country's open letter to demand better access to psychedelic treatments for cluster headache in your country.
Become a ClusterFree ambassador by sharing this website and getting involved.
News
The LICIT study is now recruiting chronic cluster headache patients in the Netherlands to investigate the effects of low-dose LSD on cluster headaches. The placebo-controlled trial is being conducted at LUMC (Leiden) and CWZ (Nijmegen). If you have chronic cluster headache and are located in the Netherlands, consider participating.
LEARN MOREAre you a chronic headache patient (18 years or older, with 5 or more headache days per month for a minimum of 3 months) who has used psychedelics to manage your headache? Participate in this study by the Microdosing Collective.
PARTICIPATE HEREOur paper "The Heavy Tail of Extreme Pain Exacerbates Health Inequality: Evidence from Cluster Headache Underinvestment" has been accepted for publication in Nature: Humanities & Social Sciences Communications.
READ THE PAPER