Podcast 2 - General Approach to the Headache Patient

This is the first podcast in a series of podcasts on headache. This podcast discusses the general approach to headache patients with a focus on diagnosis, investigations, and red flags. We identify features that can help distinguish primary and secondary headaches. Future podcasts will focus on the primary headache disorders, with a special emphasis on migraine headache due to its high prevalence in the Canadian population.

The expert guest for this series of headache podcasts is Dr. Werner Becker, a Professor of Neurology at the University of Calgary and a fellow of the American Headache Society. Dr. Becker was also the founding director of The Calgary Headache Assessment and Management Program (CHAMP) here at the University of Calgary, a multi-disciplinary program which brings a broad range of treatment options to patients with headaches. Dr. Becker is also the senior author of the Canadian Headache Society guidelines for acute migraine treatment and for prophylactic migraine treatment. Dr. Becker has no disclosures.

The main references referred to in this podcast are the following:

The Canadian Headache Society guidelines

Toward Optimized Practice Primary Care Management of Headache in Adults