Dealing with Headaches [antikvár]

"What a head have I!" Warning: a body out of balance From a hole in the head to an aspirin pill Tracking the causes to nerves and arteries The headaches of everyday life Aches that can kill Real pains that are only in the mind "Lord, how my head aches! what a head have I! It beats as it would fall in twenty pieces." The anguished words are spoken by the nurse in Shakespeare 's Romeo and Juliet, and her plaint and painful symptoms are familiar to almost everyone. She is experiencing a headache brought on by stress. Having just returned from a difficult diplomatic mission for her love-stricken mistress, Nurse feels physically and emotionally exhausted. Her head is, in effect, telling her to slow down, relax, remove herself from the fray for acoupleofhours. If she heeds theseinstruc-tions, the painful pulses of blood in her forehead will shortly subside, the taut muscles in her neck will return to their normal, more supple tone, and the splitting headache will end almost as quickly as it began. Fortunately, headaches usually take this course. Despite their pain, sometimes of frightening and debilitating intensity, and despite their chronic occurrence in some people, most headaches are what physicians call benign—that is, they do not in themselves threaten the survival of the sufferer. Only a small minority—no more than 5 per cent—arise from serious injury or disease, such as brain tumor, cerebral hemorrhage, meningitis, stroke, the aftermath of an internal head injury, or some other life-threatening condition. The other 95 per cent constitute what one pioneer student of headaches, Dr. Harold G. Wolff of New York Hospital, described as biologic reprimands. These reprimands can strike persons of all ages, and they vary widely in the severity of their pain and in its duration. location and frequency. But they share a similar purpose: They inform the sufferer that something in the body is off balance, forcing the system to make unconscious adjustments in an attempt to regain its equilibrium. These subtle adjustments consist principally of tightened muscles and expanded blood vessels in the head and neck; in turn, the muscles and vessels press upon, or otherwise irritate, various neighboring tissues to produce the painful sensations known collectively as headache. The events, or triggers, that can throw an individual's system off balance are legion and often unpredictable. They tend to be highly peculiar to the individual—one man's meat may literally be another man's poison when it comes to initiating headaches. An ordinary frankfurter, for example, is a potent headache trigger for some people; others—the vast majority—can eat as many hot dogs as they please, up to the point of indigestion. To make matters even trickier, a factor that triggers a headache in an individual on one day will not necessarily bring one on the following week, because some secondary contributing factor—in effect, one component of a combination of triggers—is absent. Some triggers are signs of excess—too much physical exertion, too much alcohol, too much of some chemical constituent in food that is eaten or air that is breathed, even too much squinting because of a glaring light or too much slouching because of a badly designed chair. But a trigger may just as well be a form of insufficiency: hunger, thin air at high altitudes or abnormally low barometric pressure. Even