The Multimodality Management of Headaches

Abstract

Rickles: I would like to approach the topic of multimodality management of headaches in terms of control because that is the term today. We could have said therapy and so forth, but control is the common word now. Control or treatment. One can think of approaches through environmental control, psychosocial stress control, ANS (autonomic nervous system), stress response control or specific pathophysiological control. These are the three areas. Now briefly to go through these. For example, under environmental control: one, there may be factors having to do with the weather, physical trauma, foods, allergens, or society in general. Obviously, a therapeutic approach to these would be education and perhaps avoidance. You might want to leave this society and go to another one or leave where these particular antigens originate and go to another area or whatever. Under psychosocial stress control there’s the possibility of teaching interpersonal coping, assertion training, Stressor identification, psychotherapy, behavior therapy. A wide variety of methods can be used to approach the interpersonal coping to control stress at the psychosocial level. Or one might approach this from an intrapsychic rather than sociological or interpersonal way.

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