Astonishingly there are no general tests for diagnosing headaches and if you believe that you are suffering from a headache and are experiencing pain then all you can do is to tell your physician exactly how you feel and it is his job to produce a diagnosis on the basis of what you say. One big problem however is that when it comes to reporting symptoms descriptions can vary markedly.



Some individuals are simply not as communicative as others when it comes to talking about how they feel and our frequently limited vocabulary does not always help very much. Talking about experiencing a 'sharp pain' may seem like a very expressive description to you but it might not necessarily help your physician very much.

As if all of this was not bad enough diagnosing a headache is made more difficult because headaches come in a variety of different types.

Tension headaches which are caused by inflamed facial or neck muscles and constricted blood vessels in the head amongst other things do not often get diagnosed by a physician as the majority of people merely treat them themselves with painkillers or just wait until they go by themselves.

By contrast, migraines are far worse and are much more likely to be the subject of a visit to your physician although even with migraines about half of sufferers do not ask for professional help.

Physicians can use a variety of factors in order to diagnose a specific form of headache and recommend an appropriate treatment and, in spite of the fact that the pain is subjective, the form of that pain is an indication of the type of headache. Migraines, for example, on the whole produce intense throbbing or pulsating sensations whereas in tension headaches pain is normally more regular and diffuse.

Migraines are also usually accompanied by nausea and vomiting as well as by sensitivity to sound and light, cold extremities and various other signs that sufferers recognize. And, as these symptoms tend to be more or less identical from one patient to the next, physicians have an objective set of symptoms on which they can base a sound diagnosis.

Cluster headaches are distinguished by a strong pain behind the eye or temple that lasts for generally half an hour to an hour and then re-occur the following day at roughly the same time. Cluster headaches can last for a number of weeks and, once more as they are quite regular, physicians have something to go on.

In cases where a headache is the effect of a serious underlying condition like a brain tumor, physicians can diagnose this without undue difficulty. For example, CT or MRI scans can reveal well known patterns that can link the headache to the physical problem underlying it.

Headaches which progressively worsen over time also provide physicians with a clue, as do rapidly shifting patterns of pain, and this might for example point to an aneurysm (a weakened blood vessel) as the root cause.

Diagnosing headaches is complicated because of many different forms of headache and the wide variety of symptoms. However the secret in all cases is to gather as much information as is possible from both the patient and clinical tests.