Introduction
Lifting The Burden envisions a future world in which headache disorders are recognized everywhere as real, disabling and deserving of medical care.
In this future world, all who need headache care have access to it, without artificial barriers.
Education is the central pillar of the Campaign.
The Problem
Headache disorders are real and often lifelong illnesses. They are very common, affecting men, women and children in every part of the world. What is more, they are disabling.
In the World Health Report 2001, the World Health Organization ranked migraine among the top 20 causes in the world of years of healthy life lost to disability1. Migraine is the cause of an estimated 400,000 lost days from work or school every year per million of the population in developed countries. Migraine harms family and social relationships and damages quality of life.
Migraine, however, is only one of several headache disorders with public-health importance. The others include tension-type headache and a group of so-called chronic daily headache disorders. Together, these are believed to be responsible for even more disability than migraine.2 If this is so, headache disorders collectively are in the top ten causes of disability worldwide, and the top five in women.
That is one side of the problem.
The other is that, although good health care can greatly reduce this burden, it still persists everywhere. In some places it is not lessened at all.
The principal reason is that health-care systems, which should provide this care, simply do not reach many who need it. This abject health-care failure has its roots in education failure at every level, and in the resulting and widespread lack of understanding.
References:
1. World Health Organization. The World Health Report 2001. Geneva: WHO, 2001.
2. Stovner LJ, Hagen K, Jensen R, Katsarava Z, Lipton R, Scher AI, Steiner TJ, Zwart J-A. The global burden of headache: a documentation of headache prevalence and disability worldwide. Cephalalgia 2007; 27: 193-210.
A new solution
Lifting The Burden is a response to these failures, which are global.
Launched in 2004, Lifting The Burden is a formal collaboration between three international charities - the World Headache Alliance, the International Headache Society, and the European Headache Federation - and the World Health Organization. Its vision is of a future world in which headache disorders are recognized everywhere as real, disabling and deserving of medical care. In this world, all who need headache care have access to it, without artificial barriers.
The first objective of Lifting The Burden is to know the size of the headache problem in all regions of the world. This can be achieved in two major steps:
by bringing together all of the published worldwide evidence of the burden attributable to headache, and by setting up new studies where the available evidence is lacking or of poor quality.
Lifting The Burden will use this evidence to achieve its second objective: to persuade governments and other health-service policy-makers, health-care providers, people directly affected by headache and the general population that headache should have much higher priority for treatment.
Lifting The Burden believes that the basis of the health-care solution for headache in most parts of the world is education. The third objective is to work with people and agencies locally, to plan and implement health-care services for headache that are appropriate to local systems, resources and locally-assessed needs. Within these services, better diagnosis and better care will be fostered through education.
Lifting The Burden believes that most headache management belongs in primary care, where education must be supplemented by clinical management supports to promote expertise and optimize the quality of care. These include diagnostic aids; region-based management guidelines; information sheets for patients, to aid understanding and promote compliance with treatment; and measures of treatment outcome.
All of this, and much more, are explained in greater detail within this site.