Doctors Use Art Created by Sufferers to Learn More About Headaches

Doctors dealing with the headache, the most common and perhaps most frustrating form of pain, are using art created by sufferers to learn more about the often debilitating condition.

A new collection of headache art--paintings, prints, photos, sculpture and mixed media--solicited from all types of sufferers made its world premiere earlier this month in conjunction with a national medical conference on headaches.

“One patient who saw that exhibit told me: ‘It is extremely comforting to see this. It so vividly shows what I suffer from when I hide in my bedroom, close the curtains and lock the door. It means I am not crazy. This is not my imagination. It means other people are suffering the same thing,’ ” said Dr. Egilius Spierings, the Dutch-born head of Faulkner Hospital’s Headache Research Foundation.

After a one-evening show at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the 200 works will move to nearby Faulkner Hospital for a one-week public exhibition at the John R. Graham Headache Center.

Researchers say headache is the most common pain form reported to physicians. Five percent of the world’s population has a headache every day, and an estimated 45 million Americans suffer from chronic headaches.

The headache costs the nation $8 billion in lost work time and medical expenses.

Spierings said letting sufferers express their pain through art can aid in a diagnostic process that is purely subjective, enhanced by no instrumentation.

“It is very difficult to get people to understand what suffering from headaches means,” Spierings said. “All we can rely upon is what patients tell us.

“A lot of that communication is lost because of concepts. We can only hear what we fit into our concepts. We perpetuate the existing knowledge more than expand on it.

“Through art, patients can express features of their headaches unrestricted by existing medical concepts. Ultimately the patients are going to teach us what is right and what is wrong about our concepts of the headache.”

Spierings put out a call earlier this year to New England headache sufferers to express their pain through art. He did so after viewing a British exhibit, done in the early 1980s of art involving migraines--one of the three common chronic headache disorders.

“Gripping Headache,” a drawing by Raymond Dorow II, expresses the physical pain level and emotional frustration of throbbing head pain over which he has no control.

A work by Rebekah Raye, “Headache No. 1,” shows that eye pain and disturbed vision can be a part of the headache experience--a connection disputed by some vision experts.

“Twenty-five of the 200 pieces of art depict in a very pronounced way the eye or the visual system. ‘Headache No. 1’ shows pain caused by intense of light. I have never seen it expressed so well,” Spierings said.

Some artists also submitted written descriptions of what triggered their artistic expression.

“All are headache sufferers, not necessarily artists. There is a lot of hidden talent here,” Spierings said. “Many of them are extraordinary.”