Treatment of headaches
Who wouldn’t want to get rid of headaches? Perhaps only the one who has never experienced the pain…
And there are not many such people nowadays. Who suffers from such a headache, which completely puts a person out of normal operation for several days, may have already gone to the doctor with his problems and consulted about a possible treatment. But most people patiently endure the headache and take it as something that “is normal” because “everyone has it”.
It is equally common to take analgesics, for example, ibuprofen or paracetamol.
Drug therapy can in many cases be a very useful treatment that suppresses the worst symptoms, or in some cases delays the development of acute problems.
However, we often encounter overuse of drugs without addressing the causes that cause headaches.
The pain then recurs and becomes a normal part of a person’s life, as well as addiction to drugs and their side effects.
In some cases, however, getting rid of headaches is not as difficult as it may seem.
In order to better orient yourself in this issue, let’s take a look at how the two most common types of headaches differ from each other. These are true migraine and tension headache.
How can we distinguish them from each other?
Migraine
Migraine headache affects up to 1/6 of the entire population. It is manifested by intense throbbing pain, as a rule, of one half of the head and a number of associated symptoms (nausea, vomiting, sensitivity to light, odors and sounds). It usually worsens with physical activity.
Up to a third of people perceive the so-called aura before the onset of difficulties – for example, various visual disorders, tingling of hands, or speech disorders. During the period of “aura”, there is a decrease in blood supply to some parts of the brain.
Fierce, throbbing pain is then associated with the expansion of blood vessels and the appearance of swelling, which is the cause of several more hours or days of dull headache.
Thus, it would seem that only bad blood vessels are to blame for migraine, which should be treated. That is not the case. The main responsibility lies with the nerves that control the extensibility of blood vessels. No one knows exactly how migraine arises, but at the moment the most accepted opinion is that it is a disorder of processing sensations. When migraine sufferers are exposed to certain stimuli, their brains go into an excited state and begin to produce large amounts of various hormones (e.g. serotonin).
Outside of attacks, migraine sufferers tend to have lower levels of serotonin in the brain. Before migraine, however, a large amount of serotonin is released from platelets in a short time. The latter will cause the contraction of blood vessels and the symptoms of an “aura”. However, a large amount of serotonin released is quickly broken down and stops working. The vessels expand again and there is a phase of persistent headache.
The main stimuli provoking problems include stress, irregular eating, hormonal changes and lack of sleep…
Interestingly, compared to healthy individuals, migraine sufferers have tighter neck and trapezius muscles (with reflexively contracted points in the muscles) and have limited mobility of the upper cervical spine into rotation.
Treatment: We will not describe here the classic treatment that your doctor will advise you (triptans, tricyclic antidepressants, etc.).
So how to treat?
For example, sleep long enough in a dark room.
During uninterrupted restful sleep without contact with artificial light, the hormone melatonin is released, which has the ability to adjust the biological daily rhythms of a person. Biological rhythms also govern the secretion of various hormones. In other words, if we want our body to produce adequate doses of hormones in ideal amounts, we need to have functional and regular biological rhythms of our body.
Melatonin also acts on digestion and on maintaining a pleasant mood. If a person can not avoid frequent travel over long distances, it is possible (for a low price and a minimum of side effects) to take it also in the form of a nutritional supplement. The results of studies suggest that taking melatonin could reduce the intensity of pain, but the effect has not yet been definitively confirmed.
Tension headaches:
Headache is by its nature blunt, pressure, or astringent. It can appear in any place on the head, even behind the eyes. If you feel pain on both sides of your head, it’s slightly more likely that it’s not a migraine. However, even tension pain can affect only one half of the head, just as migraine can occur in some cases on both sides. Usually it is not accompanied by strong accompanying symptoms (visual disturbances, vomiting, …)
And what exactly is it, such a headache? And how is it formed?
The brain of each of us is enveloped in several layers of packaging. Headache arises when our brain decides that these shells of its are irritated and there is a risk of damaging them.
In the case of tension pain, however, there is no danger to our brain envelopes, so why the pain?
The cause is the contraction of the muscles of the skull and neck. When information flows into the brain that the muscles of the neck and head are tense, the brain then evaluates the “healthy” impulses from the brain envelopes as pain. And why is that?
The nerve, which collects information about the tension of the muscles on the head, also collects information from the brain shells and brings it to the central brain, where it is further processed.
Information about the tension of the muscles of the head and information about the covers go through one nerve, so our brain is easily confused and evaluates the incoming message as a threat to the brain envelopes.
Therefore, we perceive that not only the muscles of the neck and head hurt us, but also the “head” really hurts.
Our brain thinks that something bad is happening in the brain sheath and wants to alert us to it…
Uff, it’s not easy to understand at all… and how do such muscles in the neck and head get into tension?
The causes of increased tension of the neck and head muscles can be several:
1) blockade of the cervical spine, for example, due to long-term suboptimal posture – not only the cervical, but also the thoracic spine (when we bend the thoracic spine, the head and neck must compensate for this hunch so that we do not fall backwards), for example, when working at a computer
2) blockades of the ribs (there are clamped muscles on the ribs that lead up the neck to the head), the ribs can be blocked, for example, by an inappropriate stereotype of breathing
3) stress
4) gnashing of teeth, clenching of teeth (bruxism), incorrect bite (often leads to blockade of the jaw joint and unilateral increase in tension of the chewing muscles)
5) muscle imbalance in the pelvic and pelvic floor (muscle tension is transferred along the spine and along the musculo-ligamentous chains to the neck and head)
6) other problems (e.g. untreated gastroesophageal reflux with the presence of a hiatal hernia)