Natural headache cures – exposed!

Hate taking over-the-counter painkillers? You’re not alone, especially if you’re moseying your way around the Blackmores website. After all, we’re a community of natural health lovers.

First things first: work out what sort of a headache you have. Headaches can be classified as vascular or non-vascular headaches.

Vascular headaches happen when blood vessels in your head and scalp swell. You’ll experience an intense throbbing sensation with these because the vessels pulsate.

Non-vascular headaches. The aches mostly result from tension. Sometimes they’re also triggered by other infections nearby, such as those in the sinuses, or middle-ear.

As Dr Linda Friedland says, “The pain of a headache comes from outside the brain, because brain tissue does not have sensory nerves. The pain is from the scalp, the blood vessels, and, especially, stretched or tensed muscles.”

With tension headaches, you’ll typically experience a pain that is distracting, but not debilitating – and it’s more likely to affect your whole head, rather than just one side.

5 ways to settle a tension headache:

1. To rule out potential triggers, cut out alcohol and caffeine, and instead dose up on water.
2. Keep a headache diary. As Friedland says, “This will help you determine whether factors such as foods, menstruation, change in weather, and your mood have any relationship to your headache pattern.”
3. Work on strategies for improving your sleep, such as removing the telly from your room, making sure all the outside light is blocked out at night and keeping a notebook beside your bed to record (and later deal with!) any nervous thoughts that keep you awake.
4. Keep an eye on your diet. Sometimes a substance called tyramine—found in red wine, cheese and certain fish species—can set off headaches.
5. Chill out on the lounge with a heat pack applied to any tense areas of your body (if you’re a desk jockey by day, these zones probably include your neck and shoulders).

References available on request