What Nurses Know...Headaches

by Wendy L. Cohan

Headaches are one of the most common medical complaints. Nearly everyone gets one at some point in their lives and over 45 million Americans suffer with chronic headaches each year. Headache disorders are a major contributing factor to disability and lost-work time world-wide. Altogether, diagnosis and treatment of headaches make up 20% of all visits to neurologists.What Nurses Know...Headaches is written by a nurse who has experienced having headaches all of her life. There are risk factors that are not changeable like genetics, for example. But others, such as stress, diet, or the overuse of medications, are much more easily changed through education. Other preventive strategies include following specialized diets and using mind-body techniques such as deep relaxation, visualization, and biofeedback to help people put an end to their headaches.

What Nurses Know...Headache

Headache basics Discusses over a dozen headache types based the upon American Headache Society classifications Headache care, including coping measures, support strategies,and future treatments onthe horizon A list of proven headache prevention diets

Genres: Health

354 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Lauren Read · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clear and informative headache overview and advice from a nurse, those patient-education advocates.

[J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a practicing nurse for over 18 years, author Wendy Cohan uses her training, professional observations and personal experience to describe symptoms, diagnosis, and pharmaceutical, surgical and alternative treatments for headaches.

The book is for readers that suffer from tension, migraine, chronic and other types of debilitating headache pain. Emphasis is placed on discovering headache triggers, prevention, minimizing pain, treatment of headaches, and when to seek professional help.

A glossary, resource list, an extensive bibliography organized by chapter topic, and index is included. The “weekly headache diary”, provided in the appendix as a template in which to record contributing factors, pain scale, symptoms, medication taken, and etc., to isolate triggers.

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having dealt with daily headaches for several years, I was hoping this book would provide some insight, which it did. There are many seemingly common sense suggestions for preventing and dealing with headaches. The "What Nurses Know" tips in each chapter were very helpful. After having seen at least a dozen doctors, and having multiple surgeries to alleviate my headaches, there were still suggestions and guidelines in this very readable book that I have not heard or read before. I would recommend it to anyone suffering from headaches, or wishing to help a loved one who has not yet found relief.