A consultant neurologist in north Cumbria has published her first book which is now selling around the world.
Dr Jitka Vanderpol, who works at North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust and is an honorary senior clinical lecturer at UCLan, has written ‘Helping You Successfully Manage Your Headache and Migraine. A patient’s guide’ after almost two years of hard work.
Dr Vanderpol explains why this project is so important to her, especially after experiencing her own health battles: “I designed this book to help chronic headache sufferers understand what type of headache they suffer from and what they can do to alleviate the symptoms or even prevent them.
“Recently, I was struggling with my own battle managing pain after major surgery. Luckily for me, this only lasted for a few weeks and the natural healing process helped to resolve it. Unfortunately, this is not the case for most headache and migraine sufferers. This very personal experience strengthened my decision to help patients who had reached a dead-end street and were told ‘there is nothing else that can be done to help you’, or ‘you have tried all possible medications’, or ‘this is just stress-related’. This reinforced my decision to write this book, a guide for all my patients and all headache and migraine sufferers, to help people to understand and better self-manage symptoms.
As a doctor, most conversations with my patients start off with “Doctor, I have a headache”, which for a headache specialist is like someone telling the garage mechanic that “my car is broken” – the mechanic has a much clearer idea of how to fix it once he knows the make and model. It’s very similar for me; there are more than 150 types of headache so once I know what type of headache the patient has, I am a long way towards knowing how to help them.”
Giving the unprecedented times we are all living in, the book is Dr Vanderpol’s way of reaching out to her patients and to the wider population, many of whom can feel along while suffering with debilitating headaches.
Dr Vanderpol adds: “I hope many people in Cumbria and beyond who struggle with headaches or migraines will be able to find the help they are looking for.”
You can find the book published by Cambridge Scholars here: https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-6461-9
For further support you can join our MST Headache Forum on 1st April at 2.30pm. Follow this link for more details.