Palliative care is about improving the overall wellness of people with serious illnesses including physical, emotional, spiritual and social well-being.
Palliative care begins at the point of diagnosis of terminal disease and can be delivered in a variety of health care settings. It addresses both the symptoms and the stress of living with a chronic illness. Palliative care might include treatments for discomfort, anxiety, or insomnia associated with difficulty breathing.
A Palliative care plan might involve one or more of the following goals:
The goal of palliative care is to improve the quality of life in people experiencing serious or terminal illness and to support their families. Some of the benefits of Palliative care include:
Palliative care is for an individual of any age who has been diagnosed with a serious illness that cannot be cured. Palliative care assists people with illnesses such as cancer, motor neuron disease, etc.
Palliative care may be beneficial from the time of diagnosis with a serious life-limiting illness.
Palliative care can be given alongside treatments given by other doctors.
Migraine is a type of headache that usually occurs in stages and can last for several days. Severe migraine can adversely affect a person’s daily life, including their ability to work or study. It is often accompanied by nausea, vomiting, and extreme sensitivity to light and sound.
Migraine attacks have a number of different symptoms and can affect patients in different ways. Symptoms of migraine include:
(a) Headache that lasts for 4 to 72 hours and has at least two of the following characteristics:
One out of every seven people is suffering from migraine and the chronic kind of migraine affects two per cent of the world population. Migraine is often a manifestation of our stressful lifestyles.
Women are three times more likely to have migraine than men, and up to 75% of women have found that they experience attacks around the time of their menstrual period.
Triggers of migraine vary from person to person. They include:
Tension-Type Headache (TTH) is the most common form of headache and is characterized by recurrent headaches of mild to moderate intensity, bilateral location, pressing or tightening quality, and no aggravation by routine physical activity.
What are the symptoms of Tension-Type Headache?Unlike migraine headaches, Tension-Type Headaches are not accompanied by nausea and vomiting and are not made worse by physical activity, light, sounds, or smells.
Symptoms for Tension-Type Headache include:
Tension-Type Headache is one of the most common types of recurring headache, affecting 69% of men and 88% of women.
Tension-Type Headache may occur at any age, but is mostly common in adults and older teens. It is slightly more common in women and tends to run in families.
What causes Tension-Type Headache?There is no exact known cause for Tension-Type Headache. Triggers of Tension-Type Headache include:
Occipital neuralgia is a rare type of chronic headache disorder. It occurs when pain stems from the occipital region and spreads through the occipital nerves. The occipital nerves run from the top of the spinal cord to the scalp.
Occipital neuralgia is most often associated with intense, sharp, piercing or electric-shock like pains. However, like Migraine, the pain can also be throbbing in nature. The most intense part of an occipital neuralgia episode is brief, only lasting seconds to minutes.
The primary symptom of occipital neuralgia is a sudden, severe pain that many people associate with migraines. Occipital neuralgia episodes typically begin in the neck and spread upwards towards the occipital region. Pain can move forward to the scalp, forehead and behind the eyes. This pain is described as:
Occipital neuralgia can affect anyone. It is estimated that occipital neuralgia affects about three out of every 100,000 people every year.
One may be more likely to suffer from occipital neuralgia if there is pre-existing:
The most common cause of occipital neuralgia is pinched nerves or muscle tightness. You may also develop occipital neuralgia after a head or neck injury. Other conditions that can lead to occipital neuralgia include: