I found an interesting read yesterday on some sources of headaches written Andrea Trescott, M.D. More than 20 million people in the US suffer from severe headaches, and the annual prevalence has increased nearly 60% since 1980. Nearly 80 percent of these patients report headache-related disability that may result in missed work. In fact, nearly 50 percent of headache sufferers are moderately or severely disabled by a headache attack or “migraine” and lose an estimated 13 workdays and 8 leisure days each year.1 “Migraine” is a term of much confusion in the lay public’s mind. Physicians use the term migraine to mean a specific intracranial vascular headache. Patients usually use the term to mean a “sick headache” or a throbbing headache. Pain management doctors treating headache patients are beginning to realize that the symptomatic diagnosis of migraines (unilateral throbbing headache … Read more

For six years, Lee J. Nelson searched in vain for the cause of the unrelenting headache centered like a bull’s-eye above the bridge of his nose. He consulted nearly 60 doctors, none of whom could find a physical explanation for his pain. He took 100 different medications, but even powerful narcotics brought no more than temporary relief. One doctor who considered his headache a symptom of severe depression suggested electroshock; a specialist at Johns Hopkins proposed last-ditch brain surgery reserved for intractable psychiatric problems. So the day in 2003 that the Northern Virginia consultant found the answer to his baffling and rare medical problem in a 40-year-old article in the National Library of Medicine, he was overcome. “It described patients just like me,” Nelson recalled. “I started crying.” For Nelson, now 55, and his wife, Neta, an executive at a … Read more