Medical Advice for Headaches!

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Headaches

Seeking Medical Advice For Your Headaches

All headaches are not the same and it's crucial to know whether your particular headache is a common tension-type headache or a sinus, migraine or cluster headache. This is significant because the treatments for different types are headache are themselves different and one recent study established that ninety-seven percent of those taking part in the study who were treating themselves for a sinus headache in point of fact had a mild form of migraine.

Therefore, if you suffer from more than just the casual headache once in a blue moon, you had better arrange to see your doctor and have your headaches professionally diagnosed. All the same, it is not always easy for your doctor to diagnose a headache for you and so he will need your assistance and the best way you will be able to assist him is by keeping a headache diary for maybe a month or so before your visit.

Your headache diary should naturally detail each headache noting precisely when it started and stopped as well as exactly what kind of pain you experienced. For instance, are your headaches giving you general low grade pain throughout your head which tends to be fairly constant, or are you experiencing sharp stabbing pains in a particular area of your head which tend to throb or pulse? You should also note down alongside each headache entry what medicinal drug if any you took and whether or not it seemed to be effective.

Simply your headache diary needs to detail a lot more than just selective information about your headaches themselves. It also needs to record what you were doing while the headache came on and indeed in the hours before each headache arrived. Were you for instance watching television, out shopping or working out at the gym?

As well keep a deliberate note of exactly what you ate and drank on the day of your headaches as many headaches can be triggered by such things as cheese, chocolate, coffee or alcohol.

In most cases maintaining a headache diary will permit your doctor to quick and easily diagnose your headache and suggest a proper course of treatment. However, in some cases the root cause will still be a mystery and this in general means that your headaches are being caused by some underlying condition or disease which the doctor will then need to find.

At this point the doctor's approach will depend a great deal on your own personal medical record and there are a range of tests which can be performed to find the root of the problem. Two common tools are the CT (Computer Tomography) scanner and MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanner which can give a very detailed picture of activity within the brain and the pictures produced can often be compared to well documented patterns which will point to the root of the problem.

More often than not however your doctor shouldn't have too much trouble in diagnosing most headaches from your headache diary and will be able to spot such things as migraine symptoms and triggers fairly quickly.