The treatment of headache in salvos, which is characterized by a high intensity headache that affects only one side of the face, especially around one eye, should be guided by a neurologist and may consist in the use of medicines to relieve the symptoms or oxygen through a face mask.
With these drugs the pain decreases in time and intensity, but there is still no treatment that can cure headache in salvos and make the crises disappear permanently.
Remedies for migraine headache
Cluster headache can be alleviated with the use of medications prescribed by the neurologist to prevent the onset of pain, and also at the time of crisis for relief of symptoms.
In addition to these, the neurologist may also prescribe other remedies to decrease the frequency of seizures at night and supplementation with melatonin to promote sleep. Another strategy that achieves optimal results is to use an oxygen mask because it substantially reduces the time in each cycle of headache with few side effects.
In this way, the medical treatment of migraine headache can be done with:
| Pain prevention (during crises) | At the time of the pain | For nocturnal crises |
| Verapamil | Oxygen mask | Lithium carbonate |
| Topiramate | Sumatriptan | Naratriptan |
| Ergotamine (1 hour before onset of pain) | --- | Ergotamine tartrate |
| --- | --- | Melatonin |
Side effects of medications
Despite the benefits of pain relief, prescription headache medications may have side effects such as nausea, dizziness, a feeling of weakness, redness in the face, heat in the head, numbness and tingling in the body, for example.
However, the use of oxygen masks for 15 to 20 minutes with the patient sitting and leaning forward brings rapid relief of pain between 5 and 10 minutes and has no side effects when the patient has no associated respiratory diseases.
Common pain relievers such as Paracetamol have no effect on pain relief and therefore are not indicated, but putting your feet in a bucket of hot water and putting ice packs on the face can be a good home remedy because this reduces the caliber of cerebral blood vessels, being very useful in fighting pain.
In addition to these treatments, acupuncture has already been tested by many patients and seems to relieve symptoms and decrease the time of crisis, but there is little scientific evidence of the effect of acupuncture on cluster headache.
