頭痛に対する東洋医学的診断

抄録

Headache is a common symptom frequently encountered by clinicians. According to epidemiological surveys at home and abroad, 60-70% of even healthy people have experienced some form of headache. It is remarkably diverse in nature, occurring singly in some cases and as a prodrome of a serious disease at its worst, and hard to grasp objectively.
We performed the oriental medical tests used by us in otorhinolaryngology (auscultation of vascular murmur, reaction elicited by the compression of carotid artery, puncture of stellate ganglion, measurement of facial skin temperature) on patients with headache, and obtained useful findings for diagnosis, selection of treatment and prognosis.
Vascular murmur and reaction to the compression of carotid artery were frequently detected in angiopathic headache or headaches associated in some way with vascular factors, and present on the side involved in headache in the majority of cases. The puncture of stellate ganglion can induce the alleviation of headache or its aggravation or recurrence. This change occurred most frequently in angiopathic headache, and next most frequently in post-traumatic headache. In patients who felt tenderness in the region of stellate ganglion on palpation of the neck, the puncture of stellate ganglion frequently induced a change, mostly to the worse, in headache. The facial skin temperature differed between the right and left side, and was frequently low on the affected side of the forehead or the cornea. It had a characteristic distribution in patients with headache who exhibited high temperature suggestive of inflammation. The skin temperature of the nose, moreover, tended to be higher in patients with headache as compared with normal subjects.
The results of tests performed by us on patients with headache are described above. They suggest that diagnosis from the standpoint of oriental medicine will be improved if the test results are suitably combined to grasp the pathologic process more accurately.