Headache Cures

Medical Approach

This ought to be the first step in finding a cure for your headache with no better reason than to rule out any serious life threatening conditions or disease.

Some headache types such as cluster headaches will almost certainly require continued professional medical intervention. For many people after ruling out serious medical causes they are happy to “self medicate” the symptoms with over the counter medicines, analgesics (pain killers), perhaps herbal products or so called alternative therapies, physical or psychological.

Even if the primary treatment is conventional medicine there is no reason that other cures or methods of treatment can’t be employed or investigated providing it does not conflict with the primary treatment, therefore advice from the relevant health professional should be taken first.

Medical knowledge regarding headaches is far from complete and those administering it do not always have the time or incentive that you as the affected individual have for investigating and finding a cure.

So What Do I Do Next?

Although headaches can be generally classified into a relatively small number of types, the way they affect individuals in their symptoms, causes or triggers are many and diverse.

Keeping Records

The starting point therefore is to monitor and most importantly record, because you will forget, as much as possible about your headaches, without these records patterns can and will be missed.

This sounds tedious, but is keeping a few records for while more tedious than the headaches?

It is well known that migraines can have food triggers for some people, two such triggers are known to be, chocolate and red wine, but it is also true of other types of headaches, also triggers and causes are not limited to the well known and accepted foods or drinks!

If a trigger or cause to your headache can be found it may be possible to eliminate them or reduce their frequency dramatically, so keeping records can be very worthwhile indeed.

Simple written records are fine, but for those of you handy with graphs and computers, patterns may be more easily spotted.

Even two people suffering the same type of headache e.g. migraine, are not likely to have all the same symptoms, progression or have the same trigger, so while someone may be able to tell you causes or cures for themselves, only you are expert for your headaches and keeping a records will make you a better one!

An Example of the Minimum Information You Should Record

• Date and day of week
• For women day of menstrual cycle
• Time of headache starting
• Describe location of headache and other symptoms
• Food types eaten in preceding 24 hrs
• Drinks in preceding 24 hrs, not just alcohol
• General state of health
• Amount and quality of sleep
• How stressed did you feel prior to headache

Pay particular attention to changes in routines of eating, drinking or sleeping e.g. having an extra hour or so in bed on the weekend can be significant.

Having a pre-prepared checklist will help in this task for two reasons, it will save time in the long run and you are going to be more consistent in what you record which is crucial, also you may not want to bother making a list when you have a headache or even fill one in, but do so as soon as possible after when you can still recall the facts.

Having a headache diary (or use part of an existing one) that you always have with you is ideal. Also triggers can change over time, or it may be a combination of factors that result in headaches, so a diary is useful to help spot these changes or events.

You may already have an idea or “feeling” what brings on your headaches, if so, pay particular attention to recording the related facts to prove or disprove your assumption.

Read through some of the common Causes and Triggers of Headaches on the following pages and this may help you spot something relevant to you that you had not considered, giving you that “ah ha” moment.