Diagnosing Headaches!

Headache Relief.

Headaches

How Do We Go About Diagnosing Headaches?

Headaches are one of the commonest maladies known to man and so you would think that diagnosing a headache would be the simplest thing in the world. However, it is a little trickier than most of us think.

The primary problem with diagnosing headaches is that there are no particular tests which your doctor may use to diagnose a headache and the only thing he has to work with at the start is you telling him that you have a headache and describing the pain that you are feeling. But, how do you describe the pain of your headache? Two people with precisely the same type and severity of headache will almost certainly come up with quite different descriptions of what they are feeling.

As if this were not hard enough for the doctor there's no such thing as a headache but there are in fact many different types of headache, each with their own very different causes and treatments.

Of course most headaches, such as simply tension-type headaches, are never professionally diagnosed because we simply treat them with our own favorite analgesic and put up with them until they disappear. However, when headaches are especially severe or we are suffering from them regularly we do tend in time to turn to our doctor for help.

The starting point for the doctor is to look at the type of pain which you're suffering as things like tension headaches will tend to produce a relatively steady and diffuse pain, while migraines often produce a quite intense pain which tends to throb or pulsate. Other headaches, such as cluster headaches, tend to bring on acute pain which is limited to the area around just one eye and generally recur day after day for an hour or so frequently for weeks on end.

Apart from the pain from the headache itself headaches such as migraines could also bring about other symptoms such as sensitivity to light and sound, pins and needles in an arm or leg, coldness of the hands and feet, nausea and occasionally vomiting.

All of this data when brought up together can frequently point your doctor towards a likely cause for your headache and so lead to him prescribing an efficient treatment. In a few cases however your doctor will still be left in the dark and will need to look into the possibility that the problem stems from some form of underlying condition or disease. In this case your doctor will then determine where to start his search based not only on your verbal description of your headache but as well on his knowledge of your medical history.

He may for example arrange a CT or MRI scan which will permit him to compare your results to well documented patterns of brain activity which can point to specific underlying conditions. Whatever course he decided to follow however this can sometimes produce very quick results, but it can also be the start of a lengthy search to hunt down the perpetrator.

Fortunately, testing for underlying conditions to ascertain the cause of headaches isn't all that common and, in the vast majority of cases such as tension-type, sinus, migraine and cluster headaches your doctor will be able to diagnose these rather easily and prescribe an good course of treatment.