By Rosemary Stewart, Medical Herbalist, Tiki House, Coromandel.

Headaches are medically classified in several different ways – migraine, cluster, tension, neuralgic etc.  This is useful but may not help resolve the problem. Treating headaches can be a tricky business.

Herbal medicine looks at the whole person and considers headaches to be the result of a deficiency or an excess condition.

Deficiency – results in intermittent episodes of headaches possibly with dizziness and impaired vision, worsened by emotional swings suchas anxiety or anger. Other symptoms can be nausea and vommitting.

Excess – results in headaches of acute onset with intense and persistent pain, often worsened by wind, cold or heat. Other symptoms can be blocked sinuses or poor digestion.

Other considerations are the location of the headache and the time of day the headache starts and also when it peaks. Additionally some headaches are worst pre mestrually and others are related to stress or food.

A supervised herbal medicine treatment can help you to get to the source of the problem, dealing with the deficiency by building up, the excess by clearing out and the pain with herbal anagesics.