The Auracol, a device to treat migraine headache with aura, was invented by a Dutch migraine patient, Fred Schröer, and developed in close cooperation with the Dutch engineering company, Spirid BV.
The inventor, suffering from a congenital heart disease and therefore forbidden to use medication such as the triptans, experimented with various alternative treatments for his migraine headache with aura, such as homeopathy, meditation and massage.
Eventually, he discovered that if he vigorously massaged the superficial frontal temporal arteries during the entire aura phase, he was able to severely decrease, and even suppress, the painful headache attack that invariably followed.
This technique, he would later discover, had been used successfully by Harvard doctor Stuart A Lipton in his research on classic migraine, where the treatment, called Digital Massage, achieved a success rate of 81 percent.
However, the digital massage, using the middle and index fingers, was laborious and time-consuming, so the challenge now was to develop an instrument that could replace the vigorous massage, improve the technique, and stop the imminent headache dead in its tracks.
Thus, in 2001, the development of the Auracol Massage Device began, culminating in its pilot testing in the Netherlands under Dr. Benson Hausman, and in Lebanon at the American University of Beirut (under the research name Migrend)
The device was presented at the 12th Congress of the International Headache Society in Kyoto in October 2005.
