Dealing With Headaches

Quick — how many pills do you take? What over the counter medicines do you take? Prescription? Vitamins and/or supplements? Alternative pills? Tell us now!

That’s pretty much what it can be like during an office visit, especially for chronic headaches and migraines. Your doctor or specialist will most likely want to pull out the Almighty Pad, but needs to know what your current pill intake is — including vitamins, herbal supplements and over the counter remedies.

Anyway, this is crap you need to know anyway. And it’s hard to keep it all in one place. So you need to write it down. And there are some templates or forms you can print out in order to not only help you know what you stick in your mouth, but when you need to stick them in your mouth.

Medicine Checklists

My ParenTime offers a few medicine checklists. These are geared more for parents to know when to dose their kids — or for kids to know when to dose their parents — but they can be altered to suit your situation. Worse comes to worse, print out the form, cross out the title and add your own.

Another medicine checklist for an over the counter medicine you might be taking anyway is offered from Ecotrin, made by the Evil Emporer of Big Pharma, GlaxoSmithKline. You do have to resgister with GSK in order to download the medicine tracker, just as you would to join a forum. Or so they say….MWUU HOO HA HAH.

What’s My Pill?

Another thing to help you keep track of your medicines (just prescription here) is to figure out what family your prescriptions are classified in. Ever read warnings on your prescription and they warn you away from certain large words like benzodiazepines or analgesics. These kinds of medicines may not play well with others.

Worse Comes To Worse

Once a year, get yourself a really nice treat like a cake or ice cream. But, you can’t eat it until you get a pen and paper and go through all of the medicines you take. Add these subheadings to help you get organized:

• Daily Prescriptions
• Other Prescriptions (some pills need to be taken as needed or weekly)
• Over the Counter drugs
• Vitamin pills (single vitamin or multi)
• Supplements
• Alternative medicines like herbs, tinctures, homeopathic remedies, illegal street drugs, etc.)
• Anything else you think your doctor needs to know

Now, have your treat. Update this list when you can.

Hope this helps.