The impact of headaches
The impact headaches have on patients has been underestimated, and still is to this day. Headaches are underrecognized and undertreated, leading to most headache patients being solely reliant on over-the-counter painkillers and regularly going through a lot of pain. For most people, if the pills from the drugstore don’t work, it means they are bedbound for the rest of the day. For example, in the United Kingdom and the United States, only half of those identified with migraine have seen a doctor, and only two-thirds of them have been correctly diagnosed.
This means that a substantial amount of migraine patients try to alleviate their pain by themselves without any professional help. The tendency to self-medicate with over-the-counter painkillers is very common for headache patients. This is mainly because most healthcare providers lack knowledge about headaches, and because they are still not seen as a very serious problem by most people.
For me, headaches have a large impact on my personal and professional life. As a student, it bothers me that I sometimes have to cancel classes because of a migraine. As a friend and daughter, it makes me very sad when I cannot go to parties or family events because my head pounds like crazy. And I’m not the only one. Many of my friends from university have headaches regularly - probably because the university is quite a high-stress environment and most of us feel the pressure to perform. Being bothered by headaches and migraines is particularly annoying in a setting whereby you rely on your brain to function: if I cannot think properly because of a headache, it is a lot harder to study for my courses and write coherent essays.
All in all, headaches have a large impact on performance and success not only for the working population, but also for students.
In the next step, we are going to look at the history of headaches. Has it always been such a common ailment, or are headaches mainly a modern phenomenon? And what did people do in the past to alleviate their pain, when there weren’t any drugstores from where to buy some Excedrin or ibuprofen?