What is a Headache?
Patients experience headaches for various reasons: diet and lifestyle, current or past injury, stress, sleep disorders, an abnormally functioning nervous system, or even a symptom of a serious health crisis. Sometimes, headaches are related to another health issue, such as a sinus infection or problems with vision.
For many, headaches are more than an occasional inconvenience. The pain caused by a headache can be intense and affect a person’s ability to function. Pain might be clustered in a single location or radiate throughout the entire head. Regardless of the specific details related to your headache, you need an effective treatment to relieve the pain, target the cause of the headache, and prevent future headaches. Experiencing headaches should not be a part of daily living and is not normal. For those who have had to cope with headaches for years, we strive to find you relief.
Diagnosis
Unfortunately, there is no test to determine an exact type of headache or its cause. Doctors must rely on descriptions from patients and assess their lifestyle and recent life events to make a diagnosis. Even when headaches seem exactly the same, they may be from a different cause.
To effectively treat headaches, we must find the root cause. This might take time and require the use of diagnostic tools, like MRI, EEG, etc.
Our Approach to Treatment
After the cause is established, we offer a multi-disciplinary approach to headache treatment. We include medicine and complementary therapies, including chiropractic, physical therapy, acupuncture, counseling, nutritional guidance and education. Our goal is to design a treatment program that works for each patient and targets the root cause of the headache, and we are here to guide and support our patients through this process.
Our treatment programs focus on four important factors:
- Easing the immediate pain of the headache
- Identifying triggers for future headaches through lifestyle assessment
- Preventing future headaches through lifestyle modification
- Multidisciplinary strategies to supplement these lifestyle changes to make them as effective as possible