Headaches have become a much too acceptable part of modern life. They shouldn’t be. Frequent headaches are a sign that something is repeatedly pushing the system beyond its ability to adapt, and simply learning to live with them does not explain why they are happening.

We begin by understanding your headache pattern. How long have you had them? What was happening around the time they began? What do they feel like? Where do they occur? How often do they happen? Are they affected by stress, sleep, food, movement, temperature, seasonal changes, hormones, or time of day? Your history gives us the first clues for understanding the conditions that allow the headache to occur and how we might begin unwinding that pattern.

Headache patterns we commonly evaluate include:

• Migraines
• Tension-type headaches
• Cluster headaches
• Hormone-associated headaches
• Persistent or recurrent headaches
• Sinus or facial-pressure headaches
• Headaches associated with the neck, jaw, or posture
• Mixed headache patterns

Your headache history, paired with an understanding of your individual balance of stress, diet, and sleep, helps us determine an appropriate treatment strategy. Depending on the person, this may include changes in sleep, stress, diet, hydration, movement, or daily routines; therapies such as acupuncture or massage; work with posture, movement, muscle tension, or positional patterns; and, when appropriate, further examination of neurological, vascular, hormonal, medication-related, or other systemic factors.

The goal is not simply to make the headache hurt less. It is to better understand what is allowing the headache pattern to occur, reduce the factors contributing to it, and improve the system’s ability to return to balance. We seek to make headaches more predictable, less frequent, and ideally reduce them to the point where they rarely occur.