Acute or Recurrent Headache

Abstract

Headache is probably the most common complaint for which a patient consults any doctor. Inspection of the list, which is not even comprehensive, clearly shows that it would be pointless to submit this patient to examination by the technical machinery now available. He may request the doctor to do so, and may even be disappointed and mistrust the doctor instead of applauding him when he is informed, after a ten-minute inteview, that the symptoms which had prompted a year-long odyssey from one specialist to the next, including application of the most recent technological developments, are indicative of cluster headache, and are likely to respond favorably to lithium carbonate. The cost/efficiency relation is extremely unfavorable when the diagnostician relies on ancillary examinations in the search for the cause of headache. Instead, he should be aware of certain characteristic patterns in the patient’s complaints, most of which can be verified within ten minutes.