How Do We Go About Diagnosing Headaches?

Headaches are one of the commonest illnesses 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 imagine.

The main problem with diagnosing headaches is that there are no specific tests which your doctor can use to diagnose a headache and the only thing he has to work with initially 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 exactly 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 difficult enough for the doctor there is no such thing as a headache but there are in fact several different types of headache - HERE, 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 particularly severe or we are suffering from them regularly we do tend eventually to turn to our doctor for help.

The starting point for the doctor is to look at the type of pain which you are 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 produce intense pain which is confined to the area around just one eye and typically recur day after day for an hour or so often for weeks on end.

Aside from the pain of the headache itself headaches such as migraines can also produce 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 sometimes vomiting.

All of this information when added together can often point your doctor towards a probably cause for your headache and thus lead to him prescribing an effective treatment. In some cases however your doctor will still be left in the dark and will need to investigate the possibility that the problem stems from some form of underlying condition or disease. In this case your doctor will then decide where to start his search based not only on your description of your headache but also on his knowledge of your medical history.

He might for example order a CT or MRI scan which will allow 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 track down the culprit. Visit: www.themigrainsolution.com For An Effective, Natural Alternative For Both Male and Female Migrain Sufferers

Fortunately, testing for underlying conditions to find the cause of headaches is not 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 quite easily and prescribe an effective course of treatment.