Primary Stabbing Headache

When it comes to diagnosing a variety of medical conditions, it can much more difficult than you might think, which includes the diagnosis of headache. Many people, for example, suffer from sinusitis, which is an inflammation of the sinus cavities causing head pain, believe they have sinus headaches when they are suffering from mild migraine.

For this reason, if you suffer from frequent headaches, it is a good idea to talk to your doctor and get a correct diagnosis. However, before doing so, it is also a good idea to gather information to help your doctor what can be done better by keeping a headache diary.

Whenever you have a headache you should note when it begins and ends and as accurately as you can just where you feel pain and that pain is serious. It is such a dull and constant or sharp stabbing pain that tends to come and go. It is also important to note what you were doing when the headache and started in the period up to his appearance. Food too can play a significant role in the headaches you must write down everything that you ate in the hours before your headache started. All information will be useful to your doctor.

For example, a way to differentiate headache fragmentation and a bad case of migraine is considering the pain that each produces. Both tend to produce severe pain which tends to vibrate, but with cluster headache pain is usually limited to specific areas along behind one eye or temple area. In addition, cluster headaches tend to follow a schedule set at the same time each day for several weeks at a time.

Headaches can also result directly from your lifestyle and some people may be triggered by stress, while in others they could be triggered by the consumption of red wine or eat chocolate or cheese. Stress can also play a role and it is not uncommon for people to experience headaches after moving to a new city or changed jobs. Here's your newspaper will not only help the doctor diagnose your headache, but often also a basis for recommending appropriate treatment.

In addition to what might be called "normal" or "primary" headaches there are a variety of the underlying conditions that may give rise to "secondary" headaches and sometimes even do a detailed log is not enough for your physician to make a firm diagnosis. In this case, however, there are a range of advanced diagnostic tools available.

One such tool is the computerized tomography (CT) that uses a series of carefully directed beam of X-rays to create three-dimensional image of brain. Another technique commonly used today is magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) uses electromagnetic activity in the brain to create a map of the skull.

Even with the information provided by the patient and the data collected from advanced tests for diagnosis of headache is not a perfect science. However, if you gather enough information and pop along to your doctor, eighty-nine percent of the time, it will be able to reach an accurate diagnosis.