Doctor Warns About Overdoing Headache Medicine
What you take for your headache might actually make it worse.
An occasional dose of medicine for your aching head is fine. A lot of things by prescription and even over-the-counter work great, but be careful.
People overdoing the over-the-counter medicines is something one neurologist sees it all the time.
“They’re taking four to six Exedrin a day, not even thinking about it, not considering it medication, and they in no way link this to the symptoms they’re having,” said Dr. Lara Kunschner, a neurologist at Allegheny General Hospital.
It’s called rebound. You take something for your headache – anything from a simple aspirin to strong painkillers like Vicodin – it works, but then wears off.
The headache comes back a little bit worse, so you take another dose, the cycle repeats, the pain escalates and soon you have a constant headache that nothing will touch.
“Maybe six, nine, 12 months later, they land in our office and they’re taking huge amounts of medicine and they don’t really know how they got there,” Dr. Kunschner said, “but they’re doing a lot worse than they were doing a year ago when they weren’t taking anything.”
The problem is that the signals between brain cells change so that you’re more sensitive to pain.
“They’re convinced that they have some horrible illness, and that they’re catastrophically ill, when in fact, it’s actually sort of self-induced almost. Inadvertently, of course,” she said.
So, what do you do if you’re in this situation? Clinical experience and published reports say the most effective strategy – quit cold turkey.
“Accept that you’re going to have seven to 10 bad days, but with the understanding that to get to my office, you’ve had a couple of bad months,” Dr. Kunschner points out. “So this is the trade off to getting well.”
If you’re having headaches more than 15 days a month, or if you’re taking migraine medicines more than two to four times a month, you may be a candidate for preventive treatment. Different types of medicine can be taken every day to prevent the headaches from happening or at least keep them to a minimum.
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PITTSBURGH (KDKA)