At the most basic level, what mechanism is makes your head hurt?
In: Biology
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Yes. Everything can cause headaches. Also, there are tons of different kinds. It’s very difficult to properly diagnose and treat people with chronic headaches.
While many things can *cause* headaches (dehydration, lack of sleep, loud noise, head injury, etc) I suspect that’s not what you’re asking.
If you’re wondering how they work… this is a mystery that nobody has an answer to. We can treat headaches with painkillers and they sort themselves out over time, but why they hurt? We have no idea.
It’s not like there are even any pain receptors within the brain itself. Indeed, it’s quite common during brain surgery for the patient to remain conscious, because the best way you can check you haven’t accidentally cut the wrong bit and given them a stroke is by asking them to talk and try to move their limbs and such. The patient can’t feel anything going on within the brain itself.
So why do we get headaches? Nobody knows. If you ever find out, the medical community will be thrilled.
One of the most common causes of headaches (outside of general dehydration or a hangover) is muscular. Many people sit at a desk all day and the tightening and atrophying of your traps, pecs, scalenes, and sternocleidomastoids can cause tension and irritation at their attachment sights. Specifically, the sternocleidomastoids connect from your clavicle to the back of your skull and specifically help to turn your head. When these muscles atrophy or become tight, the resulting tension pulls on the back of your skull and affects the surrounding muscles at their attachment sight, which can lead to painful headaches. Many headaches can be reduced by stretching the sternocleidomastoids. Take this video as an example, and when you lean in, add this motion: simply turn your head to the left and hold and then to the right and hold and it will stretch each of the sternocleidomastoids and can reduce many headaches in less than a minute when done properly
The mechanism behind the headache called occipital neuralgia is known – compression of either the greater occipital, lesser occipital, or third occipital nerve (there is one of each on each side), in the back of your head and neck, produces the same pain as other nerve compressions do. This is a sub-type of headache.
As someone that gets 3-day headaches, also gets migraines which are different and sinus headaches… I would love the answer to this too!
Your run of the mill hangover, dehydrated or tension headaches have their own reasons.
I can speak on my type of headaches, called cluster.
From what I was told by DR, it is caused by a certain nerve that is too close to a blood vessel. When that vessel expands, it bumps into the nerve, causing the major pain.
Expansion of the blood vessel(and the narrowing) can be caused by a many number of things.
Dilation of blood vessels. That’s why cold water/cloth on back of neck helps since it constricts vessels.
I can tell you what used to give me brutal headaches … drinking soda. I don’t even know if it’s all sodas, or just coke.
So I love Coca Cola, it’s great. And at work, we got free soda. At different companies, one just had cases of soda. One had a soda machine that didn’t take money, and my latest office has a soda fountain machine.
So I would drink a lot of coke. I also drank a lot of coffee. I would get MASSIVE headaches and my solution was “I should drink more coffee or coke because this must be a caffeine withdrawal thing”. But it didn’t always work to alleviate the headache. Only one thing actually helped … Excedrin pain killers. It’s a mix of caffeine, asprin and acetaminophen. It works.
Anyway, I don’t know how I figured it out, but coffee drinking and stopping (I didn’t drink coffee on weekends) didn’t seem to actually be the cause of the headaches. However, I did notice that not drinking coke (and other sodas) made the almost weekly headaches go away. So I stopped drinking all soda and have avoided headaches. I then later switched to decaff and I don’t think it’s the absense of caffeine that triggered them either. It’s probably not the sugar either.
Whatever it is, what works for me is not drinking soda. So I don’t.
If we could find out that would be great! lol. Ik my TMJ causes massive migraines. Even after had teeth removed it’s still n issue. I think it’s like nerves in your neck or face being pressured and that causes some of them to. Brain itself has no pain sensors but everywhere else does. So nerve compression is my best guess
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