Preface

Chapter 7 **Surgical Management of Migraine Headaches 115**

Chapter 9 **Acupuncture as a Therapy for Headache 145** Sumire Chiku and Yasushi Shibata

**Injection 129**

**VI** Contents

Michael Chung, Kyle Sanniec, Xingchen Li and Bardia Amirlak

Michael Chung, Xingchen Li, Kyle Sanniec and Bardia Amirlak

Chapter 8 **Management of Migraine Headaches: OnabotulinumtoxinA**

When I first accepted to edit this book you will read, I did not quite imagine that the content would be about so many less-known and "still containing question marks" subjects about head‐ ache. As time passed and more submitted chapters came along, I realized that most of the chap‐ ters composing this book contained many answers to many unanswered questions about headache in general.

Headache, as a main neurological problem in everyday life, still takes place as a contributor on top of the list of many partially solved neurological conditions. Not only primary headaches but secondary headaches are still clinical concerns of diagnosis, differential diagnosis, and therapy.

As a neurologist who has been seeing headache patients for 25 years, I made a simple list of ques‐ tions about headache that are often asked by my students, residents, patients, and colleagues so far and tried to find some interesting ones among them. The objective results about my "selfquestionnaire" did indeed surprise me! The content in the book did not answer all but answered most of them, for example, "Is headache a genetic condition?", "What do smartphones do to our brains? Do they cause headaches?", and "Does botulinum toxin really improve chronic mi‐ graine?". The examples may be increased of course.

This book is quite different from classical headache books. First of all, it does not contain the clas‐ sical schema of a classical headache textbook. The most important answer for the reason is that the need for non–textbook-type medical books is increasing as the needs of medical doctors in the field are changing from day to day.

In the first section of this book, you will recognize interesting chapters about pathophysiology, diagnosis, and differential diagnosis about some headache types. In the second section, mostly nonpharmacological therapeutic aspects of headache are discussed in the chapters, and some chapters are written by nonneurologist specialists. This should not, however, raise frowns among neurologists. We neurologists believe that headache patients should be seen by neurologists first, especially for the first diagnosis, but other specialists may contribute when necessary. General practitioners and family doctors see headache patients, and the number of patients they see may surprise so many people.

I hope and believe this book will be an interesting read and perhaps a guide in some new aspects of headache and help understand "some interesting headache issues" while stressing the less known mentioned above.

I thank all the authors of the book without whom this book would not be published. I will also thank my colleague and mentor who inspired me, Prof. Dr. Taner Özbenli, an important name in headache.

Finally, I dedicate this book to my headache patients, my students, residents, and all my mentors from whom I have learned so much.

**Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hande Turker, MD, MS**

Neurologist and Clinical Neurophysiologist Ondokuz Mayıs University, Department of Neurology, School of Medicine Samsun, Turkey

**Pathophysiology, Diagnosis and Differential Diagnosis of Headache**

#### **Chapter 1 Provisional chapter**
