Top UK GP Warns: Roll This 1 "Herb" Across Your Temple to Stop Migraine Attacks in 60 Seconds?
For the next six months, I barely slept.
I worked my full surgery hours. Then I came home and sat at my kitchen table until 2 or 3 in the morning. Every night.
Stacks of journal articles. Old papers. New ones. Conference proceedings nobody outside neurology has ever read.
I spent more on academic database subscriptions in those six months than I spent on my own clothes that year.
I emailed researchers in Sweden. In Denmark. In Australia. At King's College London. At the Walton Centre in Liverpool. At the National Hospital for Neurology in Queen Square.
Most didn't reply.
The ones who did, I read everything they'd ever published.
My practice manager pulled me aside one Tuesday morning. She said —
"Charlotte. You look terrible. Whatever you're doing — stop."
I told her I couldn't.
Because Sarah was 38 years old. The migraines weren't getting better. Every drug she'd been put on was either making her sick. Or denied by the NHS. Or too expensive privately.
And nobody — nobody in the entire system — was telling her WHY.
I also knew she wasn't alone.
So I kept reading.
And then.
Six months in.
I found a paper from 1983.
It had been published in a journal called Cephalalgia. Written by a Swedish scientist — Lars Edvinsson.
Most British doctors have never heard of him.
The paper was nine pages long.
What it said was simple.
The paper had been sitting in the medical literature since 1983.
Edvinsson had been awarded the Brain Prize for it in 2021.
And none of Sarah's doctors had ever read it.
I read the paper that night three times.
Then I read it again the next morning.
And I knew.
I knew Sarah's neurologist was wrong.
I knew her GP was wrong.
I knew every doctor she'd seen for fifteen years had been wrong.
Because Edvinsson had proven something nobody had been willing to look at properly.
He'd proven that migraines don't actually start in your head.
They start somewhere else entirely.
WHERE YOUR MIGRAINES ACTUALLY START
The first thing Edvinsson proved was simple.
Your migraines don't begin in your brain.
They don't begin from dehydration. They don't begin from "stress." They don't begin from hormones. Those are triggers. Triggers are not the cause.
Your migraines begin in one specific nerve.
It's called the trigeminal nerve.
It's the biggest nerve in your face. It starts behind your ear. It runs through your temple, across your cheekbone, down to your jaw.
That's the path of the nerve that creates your migraine.
In every healthy person, this nerve sits quietly. It fires off normal signals — heat, cold, touch, pain when there's an actual injury.
In yours, something is different.
Think of the nerve like a volume knob. In most people, it sits at a four or a five.
In yours, it's been turned up to a nine.
Things that wouldn't bother anyone else now set it off.
The smell of perfume in a lift. A change in barometric pressure. A drop in your hormone levels before your period. Fluorescent lighting.
And when the nerve fires, it releases a chemical called CGRP.
CGRP is the pain amplifier.
The more CGRP your nerve releases, the louder your migraine becomes.
The throbbing. The nausea. The light sensitivity. The vomiting. All of it.
This is what Edvinsson proved in 1983.
And nobody believed him.
For twenty years, he watched his work get ignored by every major headache research body in the world.
He said himself, in a 2021 interview —
"I had a tough time in science because for the first twenty years, no one was interested in CGRP."
Twenty years.
Then in 2021, the Brain Prize — the highest honour in neuroscience — was awarded to him.
Specifically for this work.
The work nobody had been willing to look at.
By 2021, every major pharmaceutical company on Earth was racing to build drugs around his discovery.
Aimovig — built to block CGRP. Emgality — built to block CGRP. Ajovy — built to block CGRP. Vydura — built to block CGRP. Aquipta — built to block CGRP.
The £600-a-month injection your NHS specialist hasn't called you back about? It targets the trigeminal nerve.
The £1,000-a-month tablet you pay out of pocket for? It targets the trigeminal nerve.
The Botox the consultant injects into your forehead? It targets nerves connected to the trigeminal.
Every major migraine treatment of the last decade is trying to reach the same nerve.
And here is what nobody has bothered to tell you about that nerve.
It doesn't sit deep in your brain.
It sits directly under the skin of your temples.
Directly under the skin on your forehead. The sides of your neck.
You can touch where it runs. Right now. With your fingertip.
Three fingers wide above your ear. Sweeping down to your jaw.
Every billion-pound pharmaceutical company has spent the last decade building the most expensive possible way to reach this nerve.
A nerve that sits directly under your skin.
You may have heard of a Cefaly. That £399 medical device some women wear on their forehead.
That's what it does. It sits over the trigeminal nerve. It sends a tiny electrical current through the skin. And it calms the nerve down.
A £399 piece of plastic and wiring. Doing what a £600-a-month injection does.
Because the nerve is right there.
WHY EVERYTHING HAS BEEN MAKING IT WORSE
Once you understand that one nerve drives everything, every strange thing about your migraines starts to make sense.
Why does somebody wearing strong perfume in a lift end your entire afternoon?
The woman standing next to you didn't even notice it.
Because the trigeminal nerve also processes smell. And when it's this hypersensitive, scents nobody else notices set it off.
Why do triptans work for a while, then stop?
Because triptans don't calm the nerve down. They just block the chemical the nerve releases.
Imagine a fire alarm that keeps going off when there's no fire. Triptans don't fix the alarm. They just muffle the sound. Eventually you hear it again.
Why does everyone else just get the occasional headache — and you get fifteen migraines a month?
Their nerves fire when something actually hurts. Yours fires at almost anything. Same biology. Different threshold.
And why has every "natural" rollerball you've tried actually made things worse?
Every single one of them.
Because of what's in them.
Peppermint. Eucalyptus. Artificial Scents. Slathered on your skin at Concentrations way too intense for anybody who actually has migraines..
They fire directly into the nerve they claim to soothe.
The same nerve. Already Hypersensitive. Hit with essential oils ten times stronger than they should be.
But the worst betrayal isn't in the rollerballs.It's in the medication itself.
Have you ever been prescribed one of these dissolving migraine tablets — Rizatriptan ODT, Nurtec ODT, Maxalt-Melt? Pick up the box. Read the ingredients.
You will find one of two chemicals.
Aspartame. Or sucralose.
Both are documented migraine triggers.
The medication your GP gave you to abort your migraine — is built around chemicals that cause migraines.
A woman wrote about her experience on a Reddit thread last year. She said —
"My migraine went from a 5/10 to a 10/10 instantly. I thought I was going mad. Then I found out it was the sweetener in the pill."
She wasn't going mad.
She was being poisoned by her own medication.This is the constraint nobody who builds for migraine sufferers has been willing to design around.
The very people who need to reach this nerve most — are the ones most easily set off by anything that tries to reach it.
I didn't build it for a market.
I built it for one woman.
My sister.
If it didn't work for her — if it triggered her, if it smelled wrong, if it did nothing — there was no point in any of this.
I gave the first bottle to Sarah.
She used it on a Thursday afternoon. The pressure had started behind her left temple. She knew within minutes what was coming.
She rolled it on. Five strokes across her temples. Three down the side of her neck.
Forty seconds later, she rang me.
"Charlotte. The cool isn't going away. It's spreading."
She didn't get the migraine.
That was eighteen months ago.
The next week, I gave a bottle to a patient at my surgery.
Margaret. 47. Two daughters. Eighteen years of menstrual migraines.
She used it the first afternoon she felt one coming.
Then she kept using it. Every cycle.
Two months later she sent me an email.
"I haven't lost a full day to a migraine since you gave me the bottle. I bring it everywhere — desk, handbag, car. For the first time in eighteen years, I'm planning my month around what I want, not what my migraines will allow."
That was the second time I knew.
I gave the first bottle to Sarah.
She used it on a Thursday afternoon. The pressure had started behind her left temple. She knew within minutes what was coming.
She rolled it on. Five strokes across her temples. Three down the side of her neck.
Forty seconds later, she rang me.
"Charlotte. The cool isn't going away. It's spreading."
She didn't get the migraine.
That was eighteen months ago.
The next week, I gave a bottle to a patient at my surgery.
Margaret. 47. Two daughters. Eighteen years of menstrual migraines.
She used it the first afternoon she felt one coming.
Then she kept using it. Every cycle.
Two months later she sent me an email.
"I haven't lost a full day to a migraine since you gave me the bottle. I bring it everywhere — desk, handbag, car. For the first time in eighteen years, I'm planning my month around what I want, not what my migraines will allow."
That was the second time I knew.
I named it Solleva.
THE COOLING CEFANY DELIVERS WITH ELECTRICITY
THE MAGNESIUM YOUR GUT NEVER GETS
THE HERBS THAT HAVE BEEN CALMING THIS NERVE FOR NINE HUNDRED YEARS
AND WHEN ONE DOES START COMING ON - THEY ROLL IT ON
WHY NOTHING ELSE ON THE BOOTS SHELF DOES WHAT SOLLEVA DOES
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENDS IN THE FIRST MINUTE THAT YOU USE IT
THE FIRST MINUTE. THE COOL.
MINUTES TWO TO FIVE. THE RELEASE.
MINUTE FIVE TO FIFTEEN. THE AFTERNOON YOU KEEP.
THE PATTERN KEPT REPEATING.
Sarah and Margaret were the first.
They weren't the last.
In the last eighteen months, more than 27,000 women across the UK have used Solleva.
The results?- Over 90% reported stopping their next attack before it landed
- Most cut their migraine attacks by half within two months
- Most have stopped taking triptans altogether
- Many cancelled the £600-a-month CGRP appointments they'd been waiting for
But my favourite stat? The refund rate is 0.4%.
That's FOUR women per thousand asking for their money back. Most of those were because the bottle arrived broken in the post. We sent replacements to every one of them — no questions asked.
Don't take my word for it. Here's what real women are saying:
Helen, 34, Bristol: "I'd been skeptical of every roll-on after the last three triggered me. But the migraines had reached the point where my husband was calling in sick for me twice a week. My sister was doing the school run.
I tried Solleva because my GP told me to.
I keep it on my nightstand now. The second I wake up with the pressure starting, I roll it on. The cool spreads. The pressure stops.
I've done every school run since June. Every single one.
Last Tuesday my six-year-old said to me: 'Mum, you don't have your headache face anymore.' I didn't know I had a headache face. He'd known it his whole life."
Joanne, 42, Leeds: "I lost twenty years to migraines. Twenty years of trying things that triggered me.
I'd given up. Genuinely given up.
My cousin sent me Solleva for my birthday. I didn't open it for three weeks. Then I had a bad attack and tried it because I had nothing left to try.
I rolled it on. Waited for the smell to set me off. It didn't.
I waited for the burning. It didn't burn.
I waited for the dread that always comes thirty seconds after. It didn't come.
I rang my cousin and cried.
I don't leave the house without it now. I haven't since."
Rachel, 41, Manchester: "I'm a solicitor. My migraines had cost me six court appearances in the last twelve months. Each one I had to ask a colleague to cover.
You know what that costs you in this profession? Trust.
I started carrying Solleva in March.
In April I had a six-hour hearing in front of a difficult judge. The pressure started at hour two. I rolled it on under the table.
I won the case.
Six months ago I'd have been in bed for three days.
I'm a solicitor again. Not a solicitor who can't be relied on for court dates."
WHAT MIGRAINE COSTS A WOMAN IN THE UK.
WHAT SOLLEVA COSTS.
THE 90-DAY GUARANTEE.
TWO PATHS FROM HERE.