HEADACHE: A COMMON SYMPTOM OF CERVICAL DISK LESIONS

Abstract

THE SYMPTOM of headache constitutes one of the most perplexing diagnostic and therapeutic problems with which the physician is confronted.¹ It is also one of the most frequent complaints, accounting in one series, for example, for 24 per cent of more than 15,000 absences among factory employees.¹ Several factors contribute to the frequency of the complaint, even when the condition responsible for the headache is not in the head. The head is logically a region where functional complaints are centered. However, Friedman and others² wisely warned against diagnosing a headache as psychogenic purely on the patient's description of the pain, and they pointed out that emotional stress and inner conflicts readily exacerbate or precipitate not only psychogenic but migrainous and post-traumatic headaches as well. Many anatomically uninformed persons consider the neck, except anteriorly, an imaginary plane separating the shoulders from the head. Therefore, if the ache or