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    User's Guide to Preventing & Treating Headaches Naturally
    User's Guide to Preventing & Treating Headaches Naturally
    User's Guide to Preventing & Treating Headaches Naturally
    Ebook98 pages1 hour

    User's Guide to Preventing & Treating Headaches Naturally

    By Jonathan M. Berkowitz, M.D. and Jack Challem

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    About this ebook

    Covering a wide range of popular alternative medicine and health issues, User's Guides are written by leading experts and science writers and are designed to answer the consumer's basic questions about disease, conventional and alternative therapies, and individual dietary supplements.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTurner Publishing Company
    Release dateSep 1, 2004
    ISBN9781591206804
    User's Guide to Preventing & Treating Headaches Naturally
    Author

    Jonathan M. Berkowitz, M.D.

    Dr. Jonathan Berkowitz is a hematologist in Solvang, California and is affiliated with multiple hospitals in the area, including Lompoc Valley Medical Center and Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital. He received his medical degree from Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and has been in practice for 10 years. He is one of 3 doctors at Lompoc Valley Medical Center and one of 7 at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital who specialize in Hematology.

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      Book preview

      User's Guide to Preventing & Treating Headaches Naturally - Jonathan M. Berkowitz, M.D.

      INTRODUCTION

      Raise your hand if you’ve never had a headache. Well, I guess if you’re reading this book, you probably have had more than your share of headaches. My point, however, is that I’d expect to see very few hands in the air. If misery loves company, people with headaches certainly have plenty of company. Indeed, it is no secret that at least 90 percent of the population experience at least one headache yearly. This book is not for the individual who has one headache a year. Rather, this book is for those unfortunate people whose headaches profoundly affect their lives. This book is for those 40 percent of the population who will tell you that their headaches are severe and debilitating. It’s for those people whose headaches present a weekly or almost daily battle to lead a normal life. Although headaches may substantially disrupt a person’s life, the good news is that for most people, the vast majority of headaches are benign and temporary, and do not portend a more serious disorder.

      Perhaps the most important things to understand about headaches are why they occur and what can be done to treat and prevent them: the essential purpose of this book. An even more important purpose of this book is to help you not only to identify and remove potential headache triggers from your life, but also to give you the natural means of successfully treating headaches when they occur.

      Chapter 1 is devoted to describing headaches and identifying which symptoms represent the typical headache versus which symptoms demand more serious medical attention. Also included in Chapter 1 are descriptions of how diet and emotions add to the headache equation. In Chapter 2, you’ll learn about the basic headache syndromes, such as migraine, tension, and cluster headaches. Chapter 3 is devoted to vitamin, mineral, and herbal headache supplements and the studies that support their use, and Chapter 4 describes several alternative headache therapies that have been successfully used, such as exercise, acupuncture, and biofeedback. Finally, Chapter 5 describes the basic pharmacologic management of headache, the treatment of last resort.

      CHAPTER 1

      WHAT IS A HEADACHE?

      At its simplest level, a headache represents head pain. We normally think of pain as resulting from an injury to a bodily site; the sensation is then transmitted through nerves to the brain and is perceived as pain. For headache sufferers, this scenario is only true in relatively rare conditions that involve facial nerves like the trigeminal nerve, a major nerve that transmits sensations from the face to the brain. It may surprise many of you to learn that most parts of the brain and head do not feel pain and only the scalp, dural sinuses, and blood vessels can actually perceive pain. The dural sinuses are like large veins in the head that carry blood away from the brain. While researchers are still sorting out where headache pain really comes from, scientists suspect that some headaches originate from deep inside the brain, in a region called the midbrain.

      Headache

      A generic term that relates to pain anywhere in the head, including the face. There are many types and causes of headache.

      Nonetheless, there are only a few structures within the skull that can actually feel pain. As mentioned, some of the head’s arteries and veins can feel pain, and we know that pain occurs when these vessels are distended, inflamed, or pulled on. The same goes for cranial nerves that can transmit pain from the face or send pain signals to the brain when they themselves are injured or inflamed. Another head-pain mechanism originates in the meningies, the tough sheet-like structure that covers the brain. Pain results when the meningies are inflamed or compressed. A classic cause of meningeal irritation is seen in meningitis, an infection of the meningies caused by bacteria.

      Meningies

      Tough fiberlike covering of the brain that can rarely get infected and inflamed, such as in meningitis.

      Obviously, the most common headache symptom is pain. This pain can be localized to a specific area of the head or can be generalized. Although pain may be the most common symptom, many headaches are accompanied by other symptoms, such as fatigue, visual changes, nausea, and vomiting. Indeed, one of the most common types of headaches is the migraine, whose classical symptoms include throbbing head pain, visual disturbances, and nausea with or without vomiting. Although headaches can display a variety of symptoms, different types of headaches often present typical symptoms. I will discuss these headaches and how they present in more detail later. For now, let’s review some of the general diagnostic features of headache.

      The course and duration of headache pain can be helpful in diagnosing its cause. For instance, in a common tension headache, the head pain builds gradually over a course of minutes to hours. Migraine pain develops over a period of hours, can last from hours to days, and tends to get better with sleep. Conversely, the pain associated with a ruptured aneurysm often strikes like a lightning bolt. An aneurysm is an abnormally formed and thinned portion of a blood vessel that can rupture without warning. Some people are born with aneurysms while other aneurysms can be caused by disease.

      Most commonly, headache location is vague and does not accurately correspond to where the head pain originates. However, in headaches caused by inflammatory disorders, such as arteritis, the patient can very accurately pinpoint the source of his or her pain. Indeed, in arteritis, the pain is normally localized right over the diseased vessel. Sinus or dental pain also produces discomfort in a relatively small area.

      Diagnosing Headaches

      As you probably know, it does not take a rocket scientist to tell you that you have a headache. It does, however, take some effort and thought to discover what type of headache you have. Perhaps one of the most important clues to the seriousness of a disorder is how long the symptoms have lasted. For instance, someone who walks into my office with their first-ever headache raises more red flags than a person who complains about the same type of head pain for thirty years. In other words, the more recent the symptoms, the more potential for a serious underlying disorder.

      When being seen by a physician for headaches, you should expect to provide a complete history and physical, and to receive a neurological exam, of which the physician will take particular note. You may also need a computed

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