You Don’t Have To Live With Headaches
Headaches can be influenced by your hormones, lifestyle, environment, and even your go-to hairstyle. If you’ve noticed that your headaches are becoming frequent, you need to get help from a pain specialist. A specialist can help you determine what kind of headaches you’re experiencing and what factors are contributing to them.
At CHOICE Pain & Rehabilitation Center, with multiple locations in Maryland, our team of board-certified physical medicine and rehabilitation specialists can identify the cause of your headaches and recommend treatment to provide relief. In this blog, our providers discuss the different types of headaches and the different types of treatments.
Types of headaches
When it comes to diagnosing the type of headache you have and its potential cause, our team at CHOICE Pain & Rehabilitation Center begins by determining whether your headaches are primary or secondary.
Primary headaches are those that generally occur on their own, and they include cluster headaches, tension headaches, and migraines. While certain factors can contribute to the pain, primary headaches generally don’t have an apparent cause.
Secondary headaches occur due to another problem. For example, they can occur because of injuries, infection, or underlying medical conditions.
As you can expect, there are some types of pain that may not easily fit into a particular category. For example, you might experience pain in certain areas of your face or electrical sensations caused by a cranial neuralgia. However, no matter your case, our team will take your symptoms and related factors into account and explore all possibilities.
Finding relief
It can take time to determine exactly what’s causing or contributing to your headaches, but we offer a variety of diagnostic tools to assist in the process. These can include:
- Physical exam
- Neurological exam
- Eye exam
- Blood tests to analyze your thyroid, liver, and kidney function
- Medical history review, including medication, family history, and more
- Sleep habits assessment
Depending on your results, our team might recommend lifestyle changes to reduce or alleviate your headaches. Or we may recommend Botox® injections, which have been shown to relieve headaches caused by muscle tension and spasms. In certain cases, we might recommend a nerve block to reduce cranial neuralgia and facial pain.
While eliminating your headaches is the overarching goal, in the short-term, we may aim to make them less severe or less frequent. No matter what’s causing your head pain, we will explore every option available to help you get relief.
If you have frequent headaches and want to put them behind you, we can get to the bottom of what’s causing them and find solutions that work for you. To learn more, book an appointment online or over the phone with CHOICE Pain & Rehabilitation Center today. Our Maryland offices are located in Hyattsville, Gaithersburg, Lanham, Dundalk, Oxon Hill, Rosedale, and Olney, and we have two offices in Baltimore.