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Psychological Phenomena

Cephalalgiaphobia

Clinical and Motivational Phenomena

Cephalalgiaphobia is the fear of headaches or of getting a headache; cephalalgia is a Latin-based term for headache. Harvey Featherstone introduced the phobia in the mid-1980s as a fear of having headache or migraine pain during a pain-free period, and individuals with the phobia often have a history of frequent migraines and tend to overuse analgesic medication as a result, preemptively taking pain medication to try to prevent a future headache. Doctors often prescribe psychiatric medications rather than pain medications as treatment, and non-pharmacological approaches using acupuncture therapy have been shown to help reduce the fear.

Facts
Classification
Type of Phenomenon
Emotional Phenomenon 1
Diagnostic Chapter
Anxiety or Fear-Related Disorders 2
Sources
1. Cephalalgiaphobia (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia Cephalalgiaphobia lead paragraph (w-bbfill-psych-diag-0926, keyword classification against phenomenon-kind enum definitions, hand-checked)View the Source
2. ICD-11 Browser (WHO)
World Health Organization
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