Diagnosing a headache should be the simplest thing in the world as almost every adult suffers from headaches and when you get one then you surely know about it. But, despite the evident pain, diagnosing a headache can be a bit trickier than you might think.
Astonishingly there are no general tests for use in diagnosing headaches and if you believe that you have a headache and are experiencing pain then all you can do is to tell your physician how you are feeling and it is his job to produce a diagnosis on the basis of whatever you say. However, one significant problem is that when talking about symptoms descriptions can vary wildly.
Some people are not as articulate as others when talking about what they feel and our often limited vocabulary does not help us either. Saying that you have a 'sharp pain' might seem to be a very expressive description to you but it does not necessarily be very helpful to your physician.
As if all of this was not bad enough diagnosing a headache is made harder by the fact that headaches fall into several different categories.
Tension headaches which are produced by inflamed neck or facial muscles and constricted blood vessels in the head amongst other things do not often get diagnosed by physicians at all because the majority of people simply treat them themselves with analgesics or just wait until they fade.
By contrast, migraines are more intense and are much more likely to be the subject of a visit to your physician although even with migraines roughly half of sufferers never seek professional help.
Physicians can use various factors in order to diagnose a specific form of headache and advise a suitable treatment and, in spite of the fact that the pain is subjective, the form of that pain is indicative of the type of headache. Migraines, for example, normally produce intense throbbing or pulsating sensations whereas in tension headaches pain is usually more regular and diffuse.
Migraines are also normally accompanied by nausea as well as by a sensitivity to sound and light, cold extremities and a number of other signs that sufferers recognize. And, because these symptoms are more or less the same from one sufferer to the next, physicians have an objective group of symptoms on which they can form a sound diagnosis.
Cluster headaches are distinguished by a powerful pain behind an eye or temple that lasts for about half an hour to one hour and then returns the next day at approximately the same time. Cluster headaches can last for several weeks and, again because they are fairly regular, physicians have something on which to base a diagnosis.
In those instances where a headache is the effect of some serious underlying condition like a brain tumor, physicians can identify this without undue difficulty. For example, CT or MRI scans can be used to look for well known patterns that can connect the headache to the underlying physical problem.
Headaches that progressively worsen over time also provide physicians with a clue, as do patterns of pain which shift quickly, and this could for example point to an aneurysm (a weakened blood vessel) as the underlying cause.
Diagnosing headaches is a complicated business because of many different forms of headache and the vast range of symptoms. However the key is to gather together as much information as possible both from the sufferer and clinical testing.
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