Did heels really trigger migraines for Michele Bachmann?

A famous shoe claim is that high heels triggered migraines for former American politician Michele Bachmann.

The story doesn’t seem to die even though we know heels don’t cause headaches for anyone else.

So could Brachmann just be very unlucky?

Could she be the only person in the world who gets migraines from heels?

The answer is not likely. But to understand why anyone is asking these questions we need to go back to the source of the original story.

Michele Bachmann never blamed her migraines on her shoes

The first and only media mention of any person ever blaming migraines on high heels relates to now-retired politician Michele Bachmann.

Bachmann was a candidate for President of the United States in the 2012 election but lost the Republican nomination to Mitt Romney.

But guess what?

Bachmann was never really reported as saying that wearing heels gave her migraines.

The only reported “news” of such a thing is a single sentence in a 2011 article on the Daily Caller website. The thrust of the article was in its title: Stress-related condition ‘incapacitates’ Bachmann; heavy pill use alleged it thundered.

There’s no doubt that Michele Bachmann was a migraine sufferer at the time she was running for election. But the Bachmann family and Michele’s campaign strongly disputed the claims that she was incapacitated by them.

As for the cause of Michele Bachmann’s migraines being stilettos, only one sentence in the article even referenced her high heels.

That sentence reads in full:

To staff, Bachmann has implausibly blamed the headaches on uncomfortable high-heel shoes, but those who have worked closely with her cite stress, a busy schedule, and anything going badly for Bachmann as causes.

Let’s break this down a little.

To start with, Michelle Bachmann herself is not actually quoted in the article. Worse still there is no suggestion that she was contacted and asked to comment about the tall shoe story (a fundamental principle of journalism).

Secondly, we don’t know who is doing the talking; the author refers only to “staff” being complained to. But we are not told whether the “staff” are the source of the story or whether the “staff” told someone else who told the author.

Hearsay, in other words. Beginning with an unknown staffer and proceeding, by an unknown route of unknown reliability, to the article’s author.

And what is said is also unclear: is it the heels themselves that are “blamed” for the headaches or is it their “uncomfortable” nature?

There’s little surprise that the article is not very reliable given it comes from the Daily Caller. The website was founded by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel in 2010 and has a reputation for publishing false and unreliable stories.

The author of the story Johnathan Strong has long since left his post as an “investigative reporter”.

In short, it’s a big assumption to rely on that one sentence as proving that Michele Bachmann blamed her headaches on her heels.

The mainstream media at least asked Michele Bachmann’s son, Dr Lucas Bachmann, about the claims published by the Daily Caller in 2011.

Dr Bachmann is not his mother’s treating doctor but he was familiar with her condition.

Dr Bachmann patiently explained that while his mother had noticed an association between days she wore heels and days she got migraines, she was not saying that one caused the other.

“The truth is she wears high heels all the time and she doesn’t get migraines [all the time]” Dr Bachmann told the New York Times in 2011, adding: “But she has found a correlation, though a correlation does not necessarily equal causation. It’s an unknown cause.”

As far as heels are concerned, that puts Bachmann in the same category as everyone else.

Feature image attribution:Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons