Healthcare For Headaches.

Who Should You See and How Does That Effect How Much You and The Insurance Company Pays?

Headaches, including migraine and other headaches, are one of the most common symptoms that people experience.

About half of adults and a large percentage of kids experience headaches.

A large number of people experience headaches and do not seek any care. Often these people may take over the counter pain relievers for their headaches.

Many of these people experience chronic, ongoing headaches.

There are many different types of headaches ranging from migraines, tension headaches, post-traumatic headaches, TMJ related headaches, neck related headaches, and so many more.

This suggests that the most common treatment, medications, are often not very effective because people continue suffering from their headaches on an ongoing basis.

A large study looked at people using different health care practitioners including MDs, DCs (doctor of chiropractic), and PTs (physical therapists) for their headaches.

The majority of the patients used an MD for their headaches.

This makes sense as most people see the MD for healthcare problems, including headaches.

Chiropractic patients were less than 10% of the headache patients.

This also makes sense because even though chiropractic care has been shown to be extremely effective for headaches most people do not know that they can and probably should see a chiropractor for headaches.

Most people also don’t realize that they do not need an MD referral to see a chiropractor.

A chiropractor can evaluate, do diagnostic tests, diagnose, and refer the headache patient out to another provider if appropriate.

Chiropractic only care was much less expensive than MD only care for headaches in risk adjusted patients (in other words emergency related headaches like a stroke, cerebral hemorrhage, cancer, etc was not considered).

In the study, some care was given with a combination of practitioners without referral from the MD but based on the patient’s decision, chiropractors + MDs or chiropractors + PTs.

The chiropractic care group was less expensive on average than the PT care group in these groups… even though seeing multiple practitioners was generally more expensive than seeing a single practitioner.

It should be noted that sometimes seeing both an MD and a Chiropractor is the best option to help people with headaches.

It really depends on the person.

Unfortunately, in many cases of people suffering with headaches they never think about seeing a chiropractor… and their MD never thinks about referring to a chiropractor to see if it would help them.

If you suffer from headaches in Texarkana, then you do have an option to get better.

Come see us at our Texarkana Clinic.

Dr. Hagebusch has helped thousands of people who suffered from various types of headaches in Texarkana since 1999.

We’re here to help you too.

 

 

Reference:

VARIATIONS IN PATTERNS OF UTILIZATION AND CHARGES FOR THE CARE OF HEADACHE IN NORTH CAROLINA, 2000-2009: A STATEWIDE CLAIMS’ DATA ANALYSIS

Hurwitz et al. (2016) Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics.

http://www.jmptonline.org/article/S0161-4754(16)00055-5/pdf