Posted 11/11/2012 2:14 PM (GMT 0)
On 11/4, I was in the hospital with my 17-year son who was hooked up to IV's for 4 days. He's had headaches for about 1 year and they've gotten better than worse, but recently he has not gone to school because of a severe 12-day headache.
This morning, after his sleep study last night, we found out my son has sleep apnea which means never having enough sleep and headaches. We are still taking him to an upper cervical chiropractor in the morning just in case he has something out of place pushing on a muscle or nerve giving him a headache (very possible). We spent an hour with his pediatrician on Friday and realized he wasn't having migraines. Everyone called them that, but he wasn't having other migraine symptoms except for the pain. He was able to function. His ped said it could be sleep apnea OR he could be producing too much spinal fluid in which case they gave him an MRI. If is comes back negative and if the sleep study didn't show anything, then they were going to do a spinal tap. So for those of you with chronic headaches, three possibilities:
1) sleep apnea
2) Producing too much spinal fluid which causes pressure on the brain and severe headaches
3) Something out of whack with your neck or spine. Don't let a chiro touch you without doing xrays, but from my research, they can be very successful in helping headaches.
Now that we know it's sleep apena, we can do something about it. I don't know what your symptoms are, but 3 headache specialists didn't venture into these three areas despite bottles and bottles of pills. Not one mentioned going to a chiropractor or the possibility of too much spinal fluid. So if you've taken medication after medication and it still isn't helping, you might want to pursue one or more of these possibilities. Good luck.