Mind those pills

HEALTH

Before you pop that pill again for your persistent headache, beware of overmedication. Chronic migraines, doctors have found, are sometimes caused by the very medicine that is supposed to treat them.

Overmedication has silently slipped into our systems, with the misconception that over-the-counter drugs are not harmful even in abundance.

In medical terms, explains Dr Praveen Gupta, consultant neurologist at Paras Hospitals, a headache caused by overmedication is called a medication abuse headache.

"It happens to people who take analgesics in excess. The definition of overmedication, however, differs from pill to pill. For example, seven tablets of Suminat as opposed to 25-30 tablets of Disprin would be overmedication in approximately the same period of time," he says.

Though there has been a slight decline in the cases of medication abuse headache in the last few years, medical experts say few people know that chronic headaches do in fact have a permanent cure.

"It needs systematic assessment by a neurologist," says Dr Gupta. Self-medication and the abuse of analgesics leads to brain modification, which may cause headaches soon after taking the pills, or with the withdrawal of the medication the body is used to