To know if it is a cluster headache, it is necessary to pay attention to the symptoms characteristic of this disease and be evaluated by a neurologist. As this is a rare disease, not all doctors know or do not know how to treat cluster headache and therefore the diagnosis may take time to arrive.
Informing your doctor exactly how you feel is critical so that the headache is not treated as a simple migraine, because the treatment of these two diseases is different.
Signs and symptoms of cluster headache include
Before being diagnosed, the person may doubt that they have a stroke or brain tumor, due to the intensity of symptoms, no pain reliever is effective and cannot relieve this headache, only medications indicated by the doctor may be helpful in shortening the duration of an episode of headache and shortening a period of crisis that can last 20 days.
Cluster headache is a key feature that is the onset of symptoms, 2 to 4 times a day, for a period of 2 to 3 weeks per year; once the last headache is over, the crisis goes away for months or years. The person may have 3 or 4 moments of severe and totally disabling headaches per day for about 20 days and then the pain may go away completely for 1 year or more, until a new epidemic occurs.
There is no fully effective treatment that completely eliminates pain or the period of crisis, but there are remedies and strategies that can help you feel better:
At the time of pain, you can use
During the days when you are in crisis:
Take the remedies indicated by your neurologist, such as:
Acupuncture can be a good option to combat stress, anxiety and rebalance the person during seizures, improving their feeling between each episode of pain. Sessions can be done day by day or every day and depending on how the person goes, several needles located in You can use the head, trunk and feet. Some hurt more than others but it is bearable and treatment improves well-being.
When seizures are very close to each other and the person cannot maintain a good quality of life and cannot work, if they have not seen any improvement in symptoms with all these drugs, the neurologist may indicate that brain surgery is underway, which may be helpful in ending seizures. However, this should be the last approach because it is risky.