Online cognitive-behavioral therapy

Severe persistent migraines can affect emotional, interpersonal, social, and work-related functioning. It is difficult to learn how to cope with pain and improve your functioning on your own. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) has been proven to improve lives of people with pain, including migraine headaches and not only in adults, but also in children. One major problem with CBT is that it is not readily available in many areas and when available, it is expensive.

I’ve written about two online programs for CBT, which offer help to patients with anxiety and depression. Another online service painACTION.com offers free resources that have been shown to improve coping with pain, to decrease anxiety and depression, and to provide other benefits. The site offers help to patients with migraine, as well as cancer pain, back and arthritis pain, and neuropathic pain. The migraine section has five modules: communication skills, emotional coping, self-management skills, knowledge base, and medication safety.

I do have a problem with their medication safety section in that it does not mention caffeine and caffeine-containing drugs when describing rebound, or medication overuse headaches. These drugs include Excedrin, Anacin, Fiorinal, Fioricet, Esgic, and other. At the same time, they list aspirin, which actually may prevent medication overuse headaches and triptans, which rarely cause such headaches (one of my most popular posts is devoted to daily intake of triptans, which is not something I encourage, but which is the only solution for some patients).

But overall, this is a very useful resource for headache sufferers. To take full advantage of this site you need to go through multiple modules, preferably on a regular basis, say twice a week. It is also useful to keep going back to the old material since it is not easy to change faulty thought processes. The site has enough material to keep you engaged for many sessions. And if you do visit the site regularly you will find that your headaches may become more manageable and that they may have less of an impact on your life.