Clinician’s Guide to Chronic Headache and Facial Pain PDF

Preface

Headache and facial pain are two of the most common medical complaints of mankind. Patients with headache and facial pain often fill the emergency, outpatient, and ambulatory settings. It has been estimated that more than 40 million Americans have headaches severe enough to require medical care. The World Health Organization ranks migraine 19th among the world's leading causes of disability. Just migraine headache is the cause of an estimated 400,000 days lost from work or school every year per million of the population in developed countries, with other headache disorders being collectively responsible for greater losses. (www.l-t-b.org, a partnership in action between theWorld Health Organization, World Headache Alliance, International Headache Society, and European Headache Federation.)

This book, Clinician's Guide to Chronic Headache and Facial Pain, is a practical, easy to use guide created for the headache specialist and other related physicians since they typically spend most of their time specifically treating headache and facial pain to the exclusion of general pain problems.

The book details the most prevalent maladies and syndromes associated with headache and facial pain. All of the headache or facial pain syndrome chapters have information on the disorder in question, the pathophysiology, the treatment, any evidence-based medicine issues and, of course, up-to-date references.

This book continues with a section dealing with other common pain treatment modalities, from psychological care to acupuncture and CAM treatments. The neuropsychological evaluation is discussed, as this may help shed some light on patients with other issues such as posttraumatic headache. Up-to-date evidencebased medicine chapters detailing interdisciplinary as well as interventional pain management treatment are also included. This section should be very useful to clinicians who treat headache, facial pain, and/or pain of any type. The book concludes with chapters on the most common medications used to treat headache and facial pain, as well as other pain problems.

In addition to headache specialists, this book is also of value to the neurologist, anesthesiologist, general pain management specialist, internists, physiatrists, general practitioners, and others dealing with headache and facial pain. In addition residents and fellows learning the ropes and other clinical specialties such as neurophysiologists, psychologists, nurses, and physical therapists may also find this information useful.

I wish to thank the many superb, patient focused, and generally wonderful contributors to this textbook!

It is my hope and expectation that the book is, in the end, helpful to our patients most of all.