No matter how you look at it, the statistics are staggering. At any given time, two million Americans are suffering from a headache. And each year, forty-five million of them suffer from headaches long and intense enough to interfere with their work. At least half of these seek medical help for their pain. In desperation, they swallow more than eighteen billion pills per year and pay in excess of four billion dollars in their quest for relief.
If you're one of the more than 45 million Americans who suffer from excruciating headaches each year, then you know how debilitating and frustrating head pain can be. But are you aware of the very powerful connection between the hormones in our bodies and head pain? In fact, hormones are the root cause of most headaches.
Based on the latest research, Headache Relief provides new insight into the whys, hows, and what-can-be-dones of migraine, tension, and food-related headaches. If you've tried everything else and still haven't found relief, help is on the way. In easy-to-understand language, Headache Relief takes you step by step through headache pain and its causes by explaining:
*How hormones work and what they do
*How to prevent and treat headaches with the latest drug therapies
*How diet, exercise, and other non-drug therapies can lead to long-term relief
Written by one of the leading headache specialists in the world, Headache Relief offers solid information, fascinating discoveries, and new hope to chronic headache sufferers.
Seymour Diamond, M.D., is the director of the Diamond Headache Clinic and of the Inpatient Headache Unit at Columbus Hospital in Chicago. The executive director of the National Headache Foundation, he is the author of The Practicing Physician's Approach to Headache, 5th edition. The Diamond Headache Clinic is the oldest private clinic in the Unite States devoted solely to headaches; each year its staff treats more than 20,000 headache patients.
Bill Still is a medical reporter, author, and president of Health News, Inc., a freelance medical news service to newspapers and magazines. Cynthia Still is a writer and former health editor of the Loudon Monitor.
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Right Now, Two Million Americans Have a Headache.
Who gets all these headaches? Primarily women. Studies show that more than 75 percent of chronic headache sufferers are female. In other words, in the United States alone about fifteen million women go to the doctor for relief from headache pain each year. Eight million of these women suffer from recurrent migraine headache and are willing to do just about anything to escape their blinding pain.
Although few women realize it, their headaches are directly related to hormones. In one study, 70 percent of women with migraine attacks reported that their headaches began just before or during their periods. Now, for the first time, researchers understand that this particular kind of hormonal headache is caused by fluctuations of the sex hormones that regulate a woman's menstrual cycle.
But it's not just a woman's sex hormones that are responsible for causing head pain. Recent research suggests that dozens of hormones govern the temporary biochemical disorder that causes that head pain. Understanding the part these hormones play in the phenomenon we call headache can improve a woman's ability to comprehend and cope with her pain.
This is the first headache book primarily for women. In Headache Relief, women can find the answers to questions about the cause and cure of sexual headaches, headaches caused by pregnancy, the Pill, menopause, puberty, menstruation, and much more.