You can t always trust your pain.
The location of your headache isn t a guaranteed way to pinpoint its cause, says Dr. Katherine Hamilton, neurologist from Penn Medicine, because of the way your brain processes information. Sometimes you can be misled by the location of pain, because it doesn t always accurately reflect the underlying cause of the headache, she says. The pain signals from the entire head and neck region all converge in one area of the brain, the brain stem. Because all of the input comes into this one area, there can be a crossing of signals, so an issue going on in one part of the head and neck can be interpreted as pain in a separate area for example, an issue going on in the upper neck region can be perceived as pain behind the eye. But the location of your headache can give you other important information about what s going on and how to treat it, she says.