Headaches: Conclusion
A current trend is to discuss holistic medicine as if it were something new, invented by alternative practitioners of the Seventies and later. Some people even seem to think that holistic medicine is a new approach, in comparison with orthodox medicine, which is deemed dry, mechanical and unrelated to real life.
In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Orthodox medical doctors have known for a long time that your genetic make-up, your working environment, your marriage, your hobbies, the chemicals with which you're in contact, your thoughts and your concerns, in fact, your whole lifestyle, are all intimately bound up with whether you feel well or ill. Holistic, in terms of medicine, means caring for the whole person - mind, body and spirit. It is not the form of medicine that is holistic, but the attitudes and views of the practitioner - orthodox, alternative or otherwise.
This point is very important, especially for headache sufferers. Good orthodox medicine is holistic, too. It's all about treating the whole person, not just little bits of him. You don't have a headache in isolation. You are a person with a headache, and in order to understand and treat that headache we need to look at the whole of you, not just the bit from the neck up. Orthodox and complementary treatments all have their place in assessing and treating that headache.
There is a second reason why it is so important to consider all aspects of you and your condition - many people don't have headaches from just one single cause. Usually there are a lot of different reasons, and their effects all multiply together. Perhaps, you've identified the cause of your own headache as cervical spondylosis. But, if you look more closely, you'll find you get other headaches as well - those caused by tension, for example (a common fellow traveller with cervical spondylosis). Maybe you get the odd migraine, too, and of course there's the pain from that whiplash accident you had ten years ago, to say nothing of the fumes that you get from the old jalopy you drive, and the mid-life crisis you're currently going through ...
It's vital to emphasise the degree to which all the various causes of headache are interlinked and inter-related. Some are so tightly bound together that its almost impossible to disentangle them; for example, arthritis in the neck is almost inevitably accompanied by reflex muscle spasm, which gives tension headaches.
This is where true holistic medicine comes in, and by this I mean medicine which looks at every single aspect of the individual. In dealing with headaches it's important to recognise that both orthodox and complementary medicines may have a part to play; that environmental, working and living conditions are important; that psychological, social and spiritual factors are involved.
With a bit of luck, you've now worked out what is the main cause for your own headaches. Or, to put it more accurately, you have probably found a number of things that interact, and you're not yet certain which of them is the real culprit.
The answer, of course, is that you needn't try to find one culprit; all the various triggers may have an effect on you. You don't need to worry about whether you've mainly got a tension headache or whether there's a bit of migraine there as well. Instead, accept all these as possible diagnoses and go to work on each of them, one at a time.
Headaches have a nasty habit of not just adding together, but multiplying each other. It's surprising how often a small problem - such as a worn-out joint in the neck - can have such amazing knock-on effects. Maybe the amount of stress that you're under wouldn't normally give you a headache, except that having a worn-out joint multiplies the effects of the tension on your neck muscles, so that even a small amount of stress manifests itself as pain, which in turn will give more spasm, which gives more pain ... It's important to look at each and every one of the possible causes of your headache and try to deal with each of them, however minor each may appear to be.
In some cases, there will be one major cause for your headaches, plus a few minor ones, in which case removing the major cause may clear up the problem entirely. On the other hand, where there is no clear-cut single cause, the best treatment consists of trying to remove or minimise as many of the contributing factors as possible. You will probably find there comes a point where you have reduced the level of insult to your head and neck below the threshold for causing pain, and suddenly your headaches go away - or at least become manageable, which is half the battle.
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