What Symptoms Warrant a Visit to a Neurologist?
The list below is not an all-encompassing list. It is a general guide to help you know when to connect with your medical team to obtain proper treatment.
- If your headache doesn’t remain as simply a headache, meaning your head pain come with a side of nausea or vomiting, or disoriented behavior.
- If you are 50 years old or older
- If you suffer through more than 2 of these headaches a week
- The severity of the headache seems to progress and worsen, and you can tell it isn’t healing properly.
- Your headache is debilitating, or it came to be following a small or large head injury?
What Kind of Specialist Can Help You?
Your family doctor will be responsible for your initial treatment and will handle minor migraines and headaches that fall into their scope of expertise. If they believe that their scope has been stretched, they might reach out to a neurologist. This referral allows further treatment that is more specialized and attuned to the needs of your brain and nervous system.
In this case, a neurologist might be the safest and most expedited method of treating your pain and difficulty. For example, spine specialists at AICA Orthopedics work with these types of neurological disorders and other spine issues in a professional and thorough manner.
In less common cases, a neurosurgeon might be called upon to treat a neurological issue with the use of surgical interventions. No matter who it is you ultimately need to see to ease your headache pain and soothe your mind, your specialist will talk through your issues and provide you with holistic and lasting relief.
How Will My Doctor Arrive at a Proper Diagnosis?
The diagnosis of something that can’t necessarily be seen right away can oftentimes be confusing. In addition to this idea, neurological diagnoses can suggest further ramifications for other parts of the body, not to mention the many side effects that can be expected.
For these reasons, it is vitally important that the patient is looked at with a physical examination and diagnostic imaging, which hopefully leads to a diagnosis. The individual’s medical and family history can actually be incredibly useful when it comes to diagnosing neurological issues.
In rare cases, other additional diagnostic checks will be provided in order to get the clearest understanding of what an individual is going through. MRI scans and CT scans are useful in seeing the interior landscape with the use of different types of technology to accomplish this task.
Sometimes, neurological tests are conducted to help the doctors involved to see the state of the brain in the midst of an “issue”. When this has happened, many find that they begin to form a more complete understanding of their particular affliction.
An EEG can help diagnose brain abnormalities and issues. In the most severe cases of neurological headaches, spinal fluid tests may be checked to be certain that the pain of the headaches isn’t caused by a more serious issue, like a brain bleed which affects the spine or an infection of the brain/spine.
The team of doctors and spine specialists at AICA are committed to providing you with top-notch care and expert advice. Contact our offices today to hear about when you might be able to come in and have your headache pain evaluated and treated.
