Tips & Tricks
Types of Headaches
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Abdominal Migraine
This sub-type of migraine is commonly seen in children. Common symptoms include abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, and loss of appetite.
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Cluster Headache
Cluster headaches are short but often painful headaches that some people suffer from for days, weeks, or months at a time. They are considered one of the most painful types of headaches.
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Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome
This disorder causes tiredness, nausea, and vomiting, and is often diagnosed in young children. Episodes of cyclic vomiting syndrome can last from an hour to several days.
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Menstrual Migraine
These types of headaches are similar to regular migraine, which may or may not have an aura. They can also involve nausea, vomiting, and light sensitivity.
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Migraines
Migraine with auras cause you to experience visual disurbances alongside standard migraine symptoms. Migraines without aura, however, tend to consist of standard migraine symptoms, such as nausea, intense head pain, vomiting, and light or sound sensitivity.
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Occipital Neuralgia
Occpitital neuralgia is characterised by pain in the neck that spreads upwards in a piercing, throbbing fashion. It typically appears on one side of the head, in the upper neck, behind the ears, and back of the head.
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Concussion
Persistent concussion symptoms is a mild traumatic brain injury. This complex disorder can result in symptoms such as headaches and dizziness for weeks or months after a blow to the head.
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Tension Headache
Tension headaches are the most common type of headache, causing mild, moderate, or intense pain in your neck, head, and behind your eyes.
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Vestibular Migraine
Vestibular migraine, or migraine-associated vertigo, causes dizziness in those who have a history of migraine symptoms. You may not always have a headache with this condition.
The Cause of Headache and Migraine
The Myths
Scientists and medical practitioners have spent many years trying to find the cause of Headache and Migraine.
"The muscles in my head are tight when I have a headache" WRONG
And this was proven incorrect way back in 1977! There is no increased tension to the muscles of the scalp during a tension type Headache. However, there is significant increase in the tension of the upper cervical spine muscles during a tension type Headache.
So what is causing it?
As technology has improved and theories have been tested, the underlying cause has become clear. The common feature in ALL Headache and Migraine patients is a sensitised Trigemino-Cervical Nucleus (TCN), or lower brainstem.
How does it become sensitised?
There are 4 potential sources that may cause sensitisation of the lower brainstem:
Insufficient amounts of Serotonin in the body (there are no clinical tests that can confirm this)
Abnormal information coming from a disorder within the head (e.g. tumours, infection, aneurysms) These are often ruled out by MRI or CT scans.
The diffuse noxious inhibitory control system has an inhibitory effect on the brainstem. It is the system that kicks in when there is pain felt in another area of the body (e.g. like when you hit your thumb with a hammer and suddenly your headache isn't so bad). There is no way to assess the efficiency of this system.
Noxious information coming from a disorder in the upper cervical spine (the top of your neck)
This makes the neck a pretty obvious culprit, especially if imaging of the brain has shown no abnormalities!
So how does the neck sensitise the lower brainstem?
It all starts with a dysfunction in the top 3 segments of your upper cervical spine
The dysfunction causes noxious information to constantly enter the brainstem.
The lower brainstem becomes sensitised by this noxious information.
When the lower brainstem is sensitised it is hyper-reactive and your tolerance for normal daily events is reduced. This includes your tolerance for stress, tiredness, dehydration, chocolate, cheese, wine, hormones etc. So, instead of dealing with these events, your brainstem is firing off and reacting - giving you a headache or migraine.