What Belongs in a Headache Diary Before a Headache Medicine Consultation?

The appointment letter arrives, and with it a quiet panic. You have had headaches for years, sometimes weekly, sometimes in ugly clusters, and now a specialist wants to know exactly when, how often, how bad. You try to remember last month. Was it four attacks or seven? Did the one on the train come with the shimmering blind spot, or was that the other one?

Memory is a poor witness to pain. Studies of symptom recall consistently show that people compress bad weeks and forget mild days, which is why a headache diary before appointment is one of the few things a patient can bring that genuinely changes the conversation. Clinicians say a good diary can do more in ten minutes than a scan does in an hour, because most headache diagnoses rest on pattern, not pictures.

This guide sets out what belongs on the page, what to leave off, and how to read what you have written before someone in a white coat does.

Why a headache diary before appointment changes what your clinician can do

Most headache disorders leave nothing behind for a scanner or a blood test to find. Migraine, tension-type headache and medication-related headache are diagnosed almost entirely from history: how the pain behaves, how often it comes, what travels with it. MedlinePlus puts it plainly: your provider will ask detailed questions about your headaches, and most people with headache do not need imaging at all (MedlinePlus).

That places a heavy load on your account of events. A consultation is short. If the clinician spends it prising dates out of your memory, there is little time left to explain what the pattern means and what the options are. A diary flips that. The frequency is already counted, the triggers are already visible, the medicine days are already tallied. The visit becomes a conversation about interpretation and choices rather than reconstruction.

There is a second, less obvious benefit. The act of recording changes how people think about their own headaches. Someone convinced that chocolate is the culprit often discovers, three months in, that the common thread is a disrupted night’s sleep or a skipped lunch. A diary is an experiment you run on yourself, with the honesty that comes from writing things down on the day rather than reassembling them later.

None of this means a diary replaces the clinician. It cannot diagnose, and it should never talk you out of seeking urgent care for a headache that feels different or frightening. Its job is narrower and more valuable: to make the consultation start from facts rather than impressions, so that every decision the treating team makes rests on what actually happened.

How a headache diary actually works in the consulting room

Picture the appointment from the other side of the desk. A headache clinician is trying to answer a handful of questions in a fixed order. How many headache days a month? Is there more than one headache type mixed together? How many days a month is acute medicine used? Are there red flags that point away from a benign disorder? Is there a clear driver, such as the menstrual cycle, that shapes treatment planning?

Each of those questions maps directly onto a column in a decent diary. Headache days per month decide whether a pattern counts as episodic or chronic. Mayo Clinic describes chronic migraine as headache on 15 or more days a month, a distinction that shapes the whole treatment approach (Mayo Clinic). Without a count, that distinction is guesswork.

The medicine column matters for a different reason. The NHS notes that regularly taking painkillers for headaches over a long period can itself cause headaches (NHS). A clinician cannot judge whether that is part of your picture unless the diary shows which days you took something. Nobody is asking for tablet counts or doses here; the question is simply which days.

The clinician will typically skim the diary for shape first: are attacks clustered around the period, the weekend, the end of a working week? Then they read individual entries for character, looking for one-sided throbbing, nausea, light sensitivity, or the tight band of a tension-type headache. Finally they look for anything that does not fit, because a headache that breaks the pattern deserves separate attention.

That is the whole mechanism. The diary turns months of lived experience into a form a trained eye can read in minutes, and it leaves the interpretation where it belongs, with the person who has seen a thousand such pages.

What to write in a headache diary: the core entries

A useful diary is boring in the best way. Every headache gets the same short set of facts, filled in the same day. Here is the core set most headache clinics ask for.

• Date and start time. Note whether you woke with it or it built during the day.
• Duration. Record when it ended, or when it faded enough to ignore. Migraine attacks without treatment typically last 4–72 hours, according to Mayo Clinic, so end times matter for classification (Mayo Clinic).
• Location. One side or both, front, back, behind an eye, or a band around the head.
• Quality. Throbbing, pressing, stabbing, or dull. Whether movement made it worse.
• Severity. A 0 to 10 scale, or mild, moderate, severe. Pick one system and stick with it.
• Accompanying symptoms. Nausea, vomiting, sensitivity to light, sound or smell, visual disturbances, tingling, difficulty finding words.
• What you did about it. Rest, dark room, cold pack, and any medicine by name and time taken.
• Function. Did you carry on, slow down, or stop entirely?

A few daily context lines complete the picture even on headache-free days: hours slept, meals skipped, alcohol, caffeine, menstrual bleeding, unusual stress, weather if you suspect it. Headache-free days are not blank days; they are the control group your clinician needs.

Resist the urge to write essays. A line or two per entry, kept consistently, beats a beautifully detailed account of three attacks followed by six weeks of silence. If you miss a day, mark it as missed rather than filling it in from memory later. Clinicians would rather see honest gaps than confident fiction.

What should a headache log for a neurologist include about medicines?

The medicine section of a headache log for a neurologist trips people up, usually because they assume it is about quantities. It is not. What the clinician needs is a calendar of which days you used something for the pain, which medicine it was by name, roughly when you took it relative to the headache starting, and whether it helped, partly helped, or did nothing.

Why the emphasis on days rather than amounts? Because the headache disorder most often hidden inside a chronic pattern is medication-related headache, and its defining feature is frequency of use across the month. The NHS describes how painkillers taken regularly for headache can end up maintaining the very problem they were meant to ease, a cycle that only shows up when use is tracked over weeks (NHS). A diary that shows acute medicine on many scattered days tells a different story from one showing use on a handful of severe days.

Timing tells its own story. If the record shows that relief came only when medicine was taken early, or that it was taken hours into an attack once vomiting had already started, that shapes how the clinician talks about acute treatment strategy. Note the outcome plainly: pain-free within a couple of hours, eased but lingering, or no change.

Include preventive medicines and any other prescriptions you take daily, even those unrelated to headache. Hormonal contraception, blood pressure medicines and some antidepressants all matter to a headache assessment. Supplements and over-the-counter products belong on the list too, because people frequently forget them in the room.

One firm boundary. The diary is a record, not a plan. If the pattern you see worries you, write it down and raise it. Do not change, start or stop any prescribed medicine on the strength of your own reading of the log; that decision sits with the prescribing clinician, who can weigh the whole picture.

How to track migraine triggers without fooling yourself

Trigger hunting is where diaries most often go wrong. The human brain is built to find causes, and it will happily find one in the cheese you ate the evening before an attack while ignoring the four other evenings you ate the same cheese and slept fine. Knowing how to track migraine triggers honestly means treating every suspicion as a hypothesis rather than a verdict.

The first correction is to record exposures on every day, not just headache days. If you only note red wine when you have a migraine, you will never see the wine you drank on the good days. Daily context lines, kept even when your head is clear, are what make trigger analysis possible.

The second is to separate triggers from prodrome. Mayo Clinic describes a prodrome phase, one or two days before a migraine, that can include food cravings, mood change, neck stiffness and yawning (Mayo Clinic). A craving for sweets followed by chocolate followed by migraine does not mean chocolate caused the attack; the attack may already have been under way when the craving struck.

The third is to accept that triggers usually stack. The NHS lists a broad range of possible migraine triggers, from stress and irregular sleep to skipped meals, dehydration, hormonal changes and certain foods (NHS). A single factor rarely tips someone over; two or three together often do. A diary that shows a short night, a missed breakfast and a stressful afternoon before most attacks is telling you something no single-trigger theory could.

Bring your suspicions to the appointment, but bring the whole record too. A clinician reading months of context can often see a stacking pattern that a single-cause story hides.

What is the 5 4 3 2 1 rule for migraines, and how does the diary feed it?

Search for this phrase and you will find a mnemonic clinicians use to remember the international diagnostic criteria for migraine without aura. The criteria come from the International Classification of Headache Disorders, third edition, a consensus document from the International Headache Society that defines every recognized headache type (PubMed). The numbers unpack roughly like this.

• 5: at least five attacks meeting the criteria, so the pattern is established rather than a one-off.
• 4: attacks lasting 4 to 72 hours when untreated or unsuccessfully treated.
• 3 and 2: the headache shows at least two of four features: one-sided location, pulsating quality, moderate or severe intensity, and aggravation by ordinary activity such as climbing stairs.
• 1: at least one of nausea or vomiting, or sensitivity to both light and sound.

Read that list again with your diary open and the point becomes obvious. Every element is a column you have already been filling in. Duration is your start and end times. One-sided and pulsating are your location and quality entries. Aggravation by activity is your function line. Nausea and light sensitivity are your accompanying symptoms.

The mnemonic is a teaching aid, not a self-diagnosis tool. Other headache types can mimic parts of this picture, and a clinician also has to rule out anything that does not belong to a primary headache disorder before applying the criteria. What the diary does is supply the raw material so that the assessment can be made carefully and on evidence rather than on a rough sense that the headaches are bad.

Migraine with aura has its own criteria, built around reversible visual, sensory or speech symptoms that typically develop over several minutes and last up to an hour (Mayo Clinic). If you get warning symptoms, time them and describe them; those minutes are diagnostically precious.

What are the 5 C's for migraines, and does the evidence support them?

The 5 C’s is another informal mnemonic, this time for foods commonly blamed for migraine: chocolate, cheese, citrus, caffeine and cured or processed meats. Some versions swap one for alcohol or artificial sweeteners. The list circulates widely, appears in patient leaflets, and has a grain of truth wrapped in a great deal of overconfidence.

What the evidence actually shows is more modest. The NHS includes certain foods, including chocolate, cheese, citrus fruit and caffeinated drinks, among possible migraine triggers, alongside more consistently reported drivers such as stress, sleep disruption, missed meals and hormonal change (NHS). Note the word possible. Controlled studies of individual foods have produced mixed results, and the clearest signal often points to the pattern around eating rather than the food itself: going too long without a meal, or a sudden change in usual caffeine intake, seems to matter more than a square of chocolate.

The prodrome problem discussed earlier applies with force here. Cravings for sweet or salty food are a recognized early migraine symptom, which means the chocolate may be an early sign of an attack already brewing rather than its cause.

This is exactly where a diary earns its keep. Rather than cutting five food groups on the strength of a mnemonic, record what you eat and when, and let months of data speak. If cheese appears before attacks and also on dozens of untroubled days, it is probably innocent. If citrus consistently precedes pain and never appears on clear days, that is worth a conversation with your clinician.

Restrictive diets built on assumed triggers can add stress and nutritional gaps without changing headache frequency. Bring your suspicion, bring your data, and let the treating team help you decide whether any dietary change is worth trying.

Who is usually asked to keep a headache diary, and who should not wait for one

A diary suits anyone whose headaches are recurrent, stable in character and being assessed for a long-term management plan. That covers most people referred to a headache clinic: those with suspected migraine, tension-type headache, headaches that seem tied to the menstrual cycle, and people whose frequent use of painkillers has raised the question of medication-related headache. In all of these, the pattern over weeks is the diagnosis, and a record of that pattern is the most useful thing a patient can bring.

Clinicians also ask for diaries after a treatment change, to see whether headache days, severity or acute medicine use have shifted over the following months. Here the diary becomes the measuring instrument for the plan, and the same consistency rules apply.

Some people are asked to wait before starting a formal diary, usually because something more urgent needs settling first. A new headache in someone over 50, or one that follows a head injury, needs assessment before pattern-tracking makes sense. The same goes for headaches during pregnancy or shortly after birth, which the NHS flags for prompt medical review (NHS).

Then there are the headaches for which no diary should be kept at all, because they are emergencies. A headache that arrives suddenly and reaches maximum intensity within seconds or minutes, a headache with fever and a stiff neck, or one with weakness, confusion, slurred speech or loss of vision needs same-day emergency care, not a notebook. The full list sits in the section on when to call your doctor below.

The distinction is simple. Diaries are for headaches that keep coming back in a familiar shape. Anything unfamiliar, escalating or accompanied by new neurological symptoms should skip the diary and go straight to a clinician.

Paper, app or migraine diary template: which format works?

The best migraine diary template is the one you will still be using in week nine. That sounds glib, but consistency beats sophistication every time a clinician opens a diary, so the format decision is worth a moment’s thought.

Paper has real advantages. A printed monthly grid with a row per day and columns for severity, duration, symptoms, medicine and notes is quick to fill in, needs no charging, and gives the clinician the whole month at a glance. Many clinics hand out their own versions. The disadvantages are equally real: paper gets lost, and calculating headache days per month means counting by hand.

Apps do the counting for you, can prompt you to record on good days as well as bad, and often produce a summary chart you can show or print. Their weaknesses are subtler. Some bury the useful fields under dozens of optional ones, which discourages daily use. Some export in formats a clinician cannot easily read. Before committing, check that you can produce a simple month view or a printable summary, because that is what will be looked at.

A plain notes file or spreadsheet sits between the two. It is flexible and easily shared, but it demands discipline to keep the same fields every day.

Whatever you choose, build the summary before the appointment. Count headache days per month, days with acute medicine, and the number of severe attacks. Write the two or three patterns you think you see. Bring the raw record too, because the clinician may read it differently, but do not make them do arithmetic in the room.

If a clinic has asked for a specific format, use theirs. A diary in the form the treating team is used to reading is worth more than a prettier one in a format they have to decode.

A headache diary before appointment: the one-page summary table

Below is the set of fields most headache clinicians hope to see, why each one matters, and the kind of brief entry that does the job. Use it as a checklist for a headache diary before appointment, or as the skeleton of your own template.

What to record	Why the clinician needs it	Example entry
Date, start and end time	Establishes frequency and duration, both central to classification	Tue, woke 6 a.m. with it, eased by 9 p.m.
Location and quality	One-sided throbbing and band-like pressure point to different headache types	Right temple, throbbing, worse on stairs
Severity 0 to 10	Tracks burden over time and response to changes in the plan	7
Warning symptoms and timing	Aura details support diagnosis and influence treatment planning	Zigzag lights left field, 20 min, before pain
Accompanying symptoms	Nausea, light and sound sensitivity are core diagnostic features	Nausea, needed dark room
Medicine name and time taken	Days of acute use per month reveal medication-related headache risk	Named tablet at 7 a.m., partial relief
Function	Shows real-world impact beyond the pain score	Worked from bed, cancelled evening
Daily context, every day	Sleep, meals, cycle and stress reveal stacking triggers	5 h sleep, skipped lunch, day 1 of period

Two habits make the table work. Fill in the context row on headache-free days, because those days are your comparison group. And keep entries short. A clinician can read fifty terse lines in the time it takes to decode three paragraphs.

Notice what is not in the table: no doses, no quantities, no theories. Names and timings are enough for the medicine row. Interpretation belongs in a separate summary note, clearly labelled as your own reading, so that the treating team can weigh it against the raw record.

What the weeks of keeping a diary usually look like

The first week is the honeymoon. Entries are detailed, timings are exact, and every yawn feels like a clue. By the second week most people have missed a day, and the temptation to backfill from memory arrives. Resist it. Mark the day as missed and move on. Honest gaps are far more useful than confident reconstructions, and clinicians are used to seeing them.

By the third and fourth weeks, the diary starts to feel tedious, and that is when it becomes valuable. Tedium is a sign that the entries have become routine rather than dramatic, which means the record is capturing ordinary days as well as bad ones. Those ordinary days are the backdrop against which the pattern shows.

How long should the record run? The NHS suggests keeping a diary for a few weeks before seeking advice about migraine, so that the pattern and possible triggers are visible (NHS). Headache clinics often ask for longer, commonly spanning at least two full menstrual cycles for anyone who menstruates, because hormonal patterns cannot be seen in a single month. If you have less than that when the appointment comes, bring what you have. A partial diary still beats no diary, and the clinician may ask you to continue it afterward.

Around the two-month mark, patterns you did not expect often surface. Weekend headaches that track late nights and later caffeine. A cluster of attacks in the days before the period. A run of headache days that coincides with a run of medicine days. Write these observations in a separate summary, dated, so you can see how your own understanding has evolved.

After the appointment, the diary usually continues. Any change to the plan needs weeks of data to judge, and the same fields, kept the same way, make that comparison fair.

Headaches before an exam or deadline: what your diary can reveal

Type the phrase into a search engine and you will find pages promising quick fixes for a headache on the morning of an exam. The honest answer is less dramatic and more useful: the headache that arrives before a high-stakes day is rarely random, and a diary kept across a term or a busy quarter can show exactly what builds toward it.

Stress is the trigger most people name first, and it is real, but it seldom acts alone. Exam periods and deadlines compress several other recognized triggers into the same fortnight: short and irregular sleep, meals skipped or replaced by snacks, long hours of screen focus, more caffeine than usual and then a sudden drop, and less time outdoors or moving. The NHS lists stress, tiredness, irregular sleep, missed meals and dehydration among common migraine and tension-type headache triggers (NHS). Stack four of them and the headache on exam morning looks less like bad luck.

A diary shows the stack. If the entries for the week before a deadline read like a list of everything a headache clinic warns against, the practical response is not a rescue tactic on the day but a different shape to the week before: consistent bedtimes, meals at regular hours, steady rather than escalating caffeine, and screen breaks. Cleveland Clinic notes that regular sleep, meals, hydration and stress management are foundations of headache prevention for many people (Cleveland Clinic).

Medicine questions belong with your clinician. If exam-period headaches are frequent or disabling, bring the diary and ask about a plan that fits your calendar. Some people are also eligible for exam accommodations on medical grounds; the diary can support that conversation too.

Do not let the pressure of the day override a red flag. A headache before an exam that is sudden, severe and unlike any before deserves urgent care regardless of what is on the timetable.

What people often get wrong about headache diaries

The most common mistake is recording only the bad days. A diary of headaches alone is a list of complaints; a diary that also captures clear days is a dataset. The difference decides whether triggers can be identified at all.

Second, people treat the diary as an argument to win. They arrive with a highlighted theory and a record curated to support it. Clinicians see this often and gently set it aside. Bring your theory, by all means, but keep it in a separate note and let the raw record stand on its own.

Third, the assumption that a normal scan means the diary is pointless. In fact it is the reverse. MedlinePlus notes that most headaches are not caused by a serious problem and that diagnosis rests largely on history (MedlinePlus). A clear scan rules out the rare dangerous causes; the diary is what identifies the common one you actually have.

Fourth, believing every headache must be the same disorder. Many people have two types mixed together, often migraine alongside tension-type or medication-related headache. A diary that records character carefully lets the clinician separate them, which matters because they may be managed differently.

Fifth, the food obsession. Cutting five food groups on the strength of a mnemonic, before any evidence from your own record, adds stress and rarely changes frequency. Test suspicions with data first.

Sixth, using the diary to make medicine decisions alone. Spotting that acute medicine appears on many days a month is a valuable observation to raise. Acting on it without medical advice, by stopping abruptly or switching products, can make things worse. The diary informs the conversation; the prescribing clinician makes the call.

Finally, perfectionism. A diary with gaps, kept for eight weeks, beats a flawless one abandoned after ten days. Good enough and consistent is the standard.

Questions to ask your care team

A diary answers the clinician’s questions. It should also sharpen yours. Walk in with a short list, written down, because the details of a consultation blur quickly afterward.

• Based on this record, what headache type or types do you think I have, and which entries pointed you there?
• Is there more than one headache pattern mixed together, and does that change how each is approached?
• How many headache days a month am I having, and does that put me in an episodic or chronic pattern?
• How does my use of acute medicine across the month look to you, and is medication-related headache part of the picture?
• Which of the triggers I suspect does the diary actually support, and which does it not?
• What would you expect to change in the diary if a new plan is working, and over what timeframe should we judge it?
• Are there entries in this record that concern you or that you would like to investigate further?
• Which fields should I keep recording, and which can I drop?
• If my headaches change in character or frequency before our next appointment, what should prompt me to contact you sooner?
• Is there anything in my other medicines, hormonal contraception or general health that you think is contributing?

Ask the questions in your own words and write the answers down, or ask whether a summary can be added to your record. If a treatment is suggested, ask how it works, what the typical timeline for judging it looks like, and what the alternatives are, including doing nothing new for now. Those are fair questions, and a good clinician will welcome them.

Above all, ask what the treating team wants from the diary going forward. The most useful record is the one shaped to the questions they are trying to answer, and the only way to know those questions is to ask.

When to call your doctor

A diary is for headaches that behave in a familiar way. Certain features mean you should stop writing and seek care, either urgently from your usual clinician or immediately from emergency services. The NHS and Mayo Clinic describe a consistent set of warning signs (NHS; Mayo Clinic).

Seek emergency care immediately if a headache:

• comes on abruptly and reaches its worst within seconds or minutes, sometimes described as a thunderclap;
• is accompanied by fever, a stiff neck, a rash, or confusion and drowsiness;
• brings weakness or numbness on one side, slurred speech, loss of vision, or a seizure;
• follows a head injury, even one that seemed minor;
• is the worst headache you have ever experienced or feels entirely unlike your usual pattern.

Contact your doctor promptly, without waiting for the appointment, if:

• headaches are becoming steadily more frequent or more severe over weeks;
• a new headache pattern begins after age 50;
• headaches wake you from sleep, or are consistently worse when lying down, coughing, straining or bending;
• you are pregnant or recently gave birth and develop a new or severe headache;
• you have a weakened immune system or a history of cancer and develop new headaches;
• your diary shows acute medicine being used on many days a month and the headaches are not settling.

None of these signs means something serious is certain; most will turn out to have a benign explanation. They mean the question needs a clinician rather than a notebook, and it needs one soon. If you are unsure whether a headache belongs in the diary or in an emergency department, treat that uncertainty as a reason to call. The treating team would far rather hear from you about a headache that turned out to be ordinary than not hear about one that was not.

Frequently asked questions

What is the 5 4 3 2 1 rule for migraines?

It is a mnemonic for the international diagnostic criteria for migraine without aura: at least 5 attacks, each lasting 4 to 72 hours, with at least 2 of 4 pain features (one-sided, pulsating, moderate to severe, worsened by activity) and at least 1 of nausea or sensitivity to light and sound. Your diary supplies each of those elements, but applying the criteria is the clinician’s job, not a self-diagnosis exercise.

What to write in a headache diary each day?

Record the date, start and end time, location, pain quality, a severity score, any warning symptoms with their timing, accompanying symptoms such as nausea or light sensitivity, what you did or took for relief and when, and how well you could function. On every day, including clear ones, add short context: hours slept, meals skipped, caffeine, alcohol, menstrual cycle day and notable stress.

What are the 5 C's for migraines?

The 5 C’s is an informal list of foods often blamed for migraine: chocolate, cheese, citrus, caffeine and cured or processed meats. Evidence for individual foods is mixed, and cravings can be an early symptom of an attack rather than its cause. Rather than cutting all five, record what you eat on every day and let your diary show whether any of them genuinely precede your headaches.

How to fix a headache before an exam?

There is no safe quick fix to recommend, and medicine decisions belong with your clinician. What a diary can show is that exam headaches usually follow a stack of triggers: short sleep, skipped meals, dehydration, screen strain and shifting caffeine. Steadier sleep, regular meals and hydration in the week before tend to matter more than anything done on the morning itself. A sudden, severe or unusual headache needs urgent care regardless of the exam.

How long should I keep a headache diary before my appointment?

The NHS suggests a few weeks at minimum so that a pattern can be seen. Headache clinics often prefer two to three months, covering at least two full menstrual cycles for anyone who menstruates, because hormonal patterns are invisible within a single month. If your appointment arrives sooner, bring whatever you have; a partial record is far more useful than none, and you will likely be asked to continue it.

Is a migraine diary template better than an app?

Neither is better in itself; the format you will still be using two months in is the right one. A printed template gives a whole month at a glance and never runs out of battery, while an app counts headache days automatically and can prompt you on clear days. Whichever you pick, make sure you can produce a simple month summary the clinician can read quickly.

What should a headache log for a neurologist include about medication?

It should list every day you used something for headache, the medicine by name, roughly when you took it relative to the headache starting, and whether it helped fully, partly or not at all. Quantities and doses are not needed. Also list daily prescriptions, hormonal contraception, over-the-counter products and supplements, since any of these can be relevant to the assessment.

How to track migraine triggers accurately?

Record exposures such as sleep, meals, alcohol, caffeine and stress on every single day, not just headache days, so you can compare. Treat each suspected trigger as a hypothesis and look for it on clear days too. Remember that triggers usually stack, and that cravings or mood changes in the day or two before an attack may be early migraine symptoms rather than causes.

Do I need to record headache-free days too?

Yes. Headache-free days are the comparison group that makes the rest of the diary meaningful. If you only note late nights or cheese on days you had a migraine, you can never see how often the same exposures passed without a headache. A single line of context on clear days, taking under a minute, is what turns a list of complaints into evidence.

Can my headache diary tell me whether I have medication overuse headache?

It can raise the question, but not answer it. The NHS notes that regular painkiller use over a long period can itself cause headaches, and a diary showing acute medicine on many scattered days each month is exactly the pattern a clinician will want to discuss. Do not stop or change any medicine on your own reading; bring the record and let the prescribing clinician assess it alongside your history.

References

• NHS: Migraine
• NHS: Headaches
• MedlinePlus: Headache
• Cleveland Clinic: Headaches

This article is for general information only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Please consult a qualified doctor about your individual situation.