By: Peter Wehrwein, Managing Editor, Logan Lutton
Have a headache and there is pain from around your eyes? Is it an eye problem?
“In some cases, the brain or your mind can be not very good at differentiating what pain is coming from the eyeball itself, what is coming from the structures round about the eyeball — what we call the orbit, the eye socket — or what is actually truly coming from other parts of the head, and it feels to the patient as if it’s coming from the eyes,” explains Michael Gilhooley, M.D., Ph.D., a neuro-ophthalmologist at Doheny Eye Institute in Pasadena, California.
Gilhooley gave a talk today about headaches at the American Academy of Ophthalmology annual meeting in Orlando, Florida. The title, “What You Need to Know About Headache: A Pain for the Patient and a Pain for the Doctor,” hints at the difficulties in diagnosis and treatment that headaches can present for ophthalmologists, Gilhooley explained in an interview with Managed Healthcare Executive before his talk.