Many people suffer from frequent, severe headaches, especially those with migraine. These headaches need careful treatment, with a focus on prevention. Talk to your doctor about ways to prevent and treat your headaches.
It is easy to use too much pain medicine. This can make headaches worse and cause other medical problems.
Over-the-counter pain medicines can have dangerous side effects.
Aspirin, acetaminophen and ibuprofen often work well for headaches if you don’t use them often.
But if you take these drugs too often, you can get serious side effects. In rare cases, if you often take acetaminophen a number of days in a row, you can damage your liver. This can happen even if you take just a little over the recommended dose.
Rarely, these drugs can also cause kidney problems. Aspirin and ibuprofen can, at times, cause stomach bleeding.
Watch out for overuse headaches.
If you take pain medicines for headache too often, they may no longer help as much, and you may also get headaches more often. This worsening of headache is called “medication overuse headache.” Although all drugs used for treating individual migraine attacks can cause medication overuse headache if taken too often, the following drugs are the most likely ones to cause overuse headaches. They may also make you more sensitive to pain:
Prescription drugs:
For more information, visit www.migrainecanada.org.
Conditions: migraine attacks, headaches
Diagnostic Tests: xyz
Treatments: painkillers, analgesics, butalbital (Fiorinal, Pronal, Trinal, and generics), opioid painkillers, Codeine (Tylenol 3 and other brands and generics), Hycodon, Oxycodone (OxyContin, Percocet and others), Morphine