Many people view going to the doctor as a form of cruelty.
You’ re already feeling bad. Why make it worse by doing something that just makes you uncomfortable and will most likely result in bad news? But if you’ re a headache or migraine sufferer, this attitude actually could be adding to your burden.
Few people understand this better than Roger Cady, MD, founder of the Headache Care Center in Springfield, Mo., and a leader in the field of headache and migraine research for more than 20 years. Dr. Cady is a firm believer in the collaborative care model, in which patients and health care professionals come together to create treatment models that work. This all starts with forging better communication between physicians and patients.
Although Dr. Cady has been working in the field since the early 1990s, he’ s been personally involved with headache for much longer than that. He comes from what he calls a“ migraine family”— both his mother and sister were affected by migraine— so for him working with headache patients is more than just a job.
HEAD WISE( HW): What’ s the biggest change you’ ve seen in the headache field over the years? DR. CADY: There’ s been a phenomenal amount of change. Basically, migraine was [ thought of as ] one of those psychosomatic stress disorders, viewed more as a disorder that women had. It really did not have a great deal of respect. When sumatriptan came onto the market, it changed everything because suddenly we had a drug that worked in a receptor, and it validated the whole biologic model of migraine. In those early clinical trials, it was like a miracle because people could literally have a severe migraine turned around in less than an hour. Prior to that, all we were doing was treating symptoms. We really didn’ t have medications that stopped migraine or worked on the process of migraine. So this was a huge paradigm shift.
It was a very difficult time for patients prior to that. There weren’ t good treatments. There was a lot of impact in terms of missing work. There was this notion that, in some way, people were bringing this on themselves. In the last 20 years, we’ ve recognized much more the genetics of migraine, and we’ ve developed better treatments. We certainly have a long way to go, but migraine has positioned itself in the field of neurology as a very important disease process.
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