Gradual spread versus sudden onset, positive versus negative symptoms – and why any doubt means calling emergency services.
For roughly one in four migraine sufferers, an attack doesn't begin with pain. It begins with a warning — a shimmering zigzag creeping across your field of vision, a patch of numbness spreading up an arm, or a strange difficulty finding the right words. This is migraine aura, and for those who experience it, it…
If you've ever felt a sudden flash of light in your vision, a wave of numbness down one arm, or a headache unlike any you've had before, you've probably had the same thought that crosses every migraine sufferer's mind at some point: is this just another migraine, or is something more serious happening? It's not…
Almost everyone who lives with migraine has had the thought cross their mind during a particularly bad attack: what if this isn't a migraine at all? It's an uncomfortable question, but it's the right one to ask — because while the vast majority of severe headaches are exactly what they seem, a small number are…
You've had headaches for years. Maybe you've even been told it's migraine. But the pain always seems to start in the same spot at the back of your skull, your neck feels stiff and tender before it hits, and pressing on certain spots in your neck seems to bring the exact same headache back. Is…
They're both severe. They're both disabling. And they're both, far too often, confused for one another — sometimes for years. But migraine and cluster headache are fundamentally different conditions, with different patterns, different triggers, and different treatment paths. Getting the diagnosis right matters, because the wrong one leads to the wrong treatment.
Here's how to…
Tension-type headache and migraine are the two most common headache disorders in the world, and they're also two of the most frequently confused. Tension-type headache affects roughly 30% of people at some point in a given year, migraine closer to 15%, and the two share enough features—head pain, some sensitivity to light or sound, a…
For most people, a migraine attack—however brutal—eventually breaks. The pain crests, the nausea passes, and within a day or so, life resumes. But for some patients, the attack doesn't end. It rolls on for 72 hours or more, resistant to the usual medications, sometimes requiring an emergency room visit just to get it to stop.…
Headache patients are often told they have migraine, when what they actually have is something that only looks like migraine. Cervicogenic headache and migraine can share enough features—one-sided pain, nausea, light sensitivity—that misdiagnosis is common, with some estimates suggesting incorrect diagnosis in roughly half of chronic headache cases. Telling the two apart matters, because treating…
You see the zigzag lines. The blind spot creeps across your vision. Your hand goes tingly, or words won't come out right for a few minutes. And then... nothing. No head pain follows. If this sounds familiar, you've experienced what's commonly called a "silent migraine" — and clinically, it's a real, recognized migraine subtype, not…