Headache treatments come in two forms—abortive and preventive. The abortive form is familiar to most people. It means something you do to get rid of a headache that has already started. Usually it consists of an over-the-counter or prescription medication, but in some cases, a non-drug approach works. By contrast, a preventive treatment is something you do every day with goal of keeping some future attacks from even starting. These, too, can involve drug and non-drug strategies.

Billions of dollars are spent each year on abortive remedies. For most part, they are dollars well spent. And for people who have infrequent headaches that are rapidly and reliably resolved by an abortive treatment, a preventive treatment might be needless.

But if attacks are frequent, hard to resolve, interfere with usual activities—or side-effects from abortive treatment interfere with usual activities—then a preventive treatment should be considered. Employing a preventive remedy does not preclude also using an abortive measure: each can be part of an integrated plan.

Before discussing specific treatments for specific headache types, let's consider impacts of recurring headaches. The more obvious impact is sheer unpleasantness and suffering involved in an attack. However, another impact—though less obvious—is in its own way just as important. And that is associated disability or loss of function that comes with an attack.

If a headache attack is severe, then whatever else was planned for that day goes out window—it's just not going to happen. If an attack is moderate in intensity, then usual activities might be possible, but occur more slowly, less efficiently, or require more effort to produce. This, too, represents headache-associated disability.

An increasing trend in field of headache management is for practitioners to address their patients' loss of function as well as their pain and suffering. Drs. Richard Lipton and Walter Stewart designed a questionnaire to estimate headache-associated disability, called MIDAS (Migraine Disability Assessment) scale which can also be used for non-migraine headaches.

Measuring and then re-measuring MIDAS is one method for judging if a preventive treatment is effective. But to accurately detect effectiveness (or lack of effectiveness) of a preventive headache treatment there should also be some sort of day-by-day recording system.

What is stuttering?

Stuttering (or stammering) is a voice disfluency, a speech disorder. When a person stutters, normal flow of speech is disrupted by repetitions and/or prolongations of voice sounds. Frequently, an individual is also unable to start a word.

Child stuttering, toddler stuttering and adult stuttering are themes being studied by many scientists and speech specialists all around world. The Stuttering Foundation of America, National Stuttering Association, National Center for Stuttering and individual speech therapists in general are all investigating why people stutter and finding effective and fast speech therapies.

Nevertheless, even though scientists have several theories and suspect a variety of causes for stuttering, precise mechanisms causing this disability (also called stammering) are not understood. Some believe that many forms have genetic origins.

A common form of stuttering is neurogenic. Neurogenic stuttering arise from signal problems between brain and nerves or muscles. In neurogenic stuttering, brain is unable to adequately coordinate different components of speech mechanism.