From an elongated scream to a handful of brains being wrenched from a skull, chronic headache sufferers have tried to put a face on their invisible enemy in an exhibition that opened Friday.
Titled "Through the Looking Glass," the exhibition of more than 200 paintings was solicited for medical study and interpretation of all kinds of headache problems, said Dr. Egilius Spierings, director of The Headache Research Foundation at the Boston Faulkner Hospital."It tells more about what headache suffering is like than a thousand words," Spierings said.
The many faces of pain stare out from the entries. The work judged best of show is titled simply "Headache," showing a distorted face, the eyes dark hollows, the open mouth pulled down in a soundless howl of pain.
Other pictures show heads pierced by sharp objects or faces submerged in murky water. A drawing called "Gripping Headache" shows a disembodied hand literally ripping the brain through the skull.
The display is part of the 31st Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Association for the Study of Headache. A previous exhibition in 1987 featured painting by British migraine sufferers, but Spierings said the latest exhibit was the first designed for doctors to review.
Looking at the headache art can give doctors new understanding of their patients' problems, said Dr. Joel Saper, vice president of the association and director of the Michigan Head Pain and Neurological Institute in Ann Arbor, Mich.
"The art itself is not a diagnostic clue, what it will give us is some insight into the suffering of these patients and make us more sensitive."
Spierings said patients sometimes are limited by how they can describe their pain, but pictures speak more freely.
"This is an expression by headache sufferers that is unbiased by existing medical knowledge," Spierings said. "We know relatively little about headaches, so that's why we cannot help all headache sufferers."
In the Boston exhibit, about 25 pictures depict eyes staring out of the head, something Spierings said may be a clue to the location of pain.
"In a recent study we found that 50 percent of chronic headache sufferers have blurred vision with their headaches. I think that this is something that has been neglected," he said.
The art, paintings, photographs, sculpture and mixed media works, deal with chronic tension, migraine and cluster headaches.
"We wanted to focus in on headache and also to take the focus away to a certain extent on migraine," Spierings said. Migraine, with its precursors of disturbed vision and its well-established history of debilitating pain has cornered most of the attention and research devoted to headaches, he said.
But tension headaches, caused when the muscles in the scalp, face or neck are tensed for extended periods of time, and cluster headaches, which generally affect men, are equally debilitating, Spierings said.
About 5 percent of the world's population suffers daily headaches and 15 percent have a headache at least once a week, according to the headache research foundation.
The message of over-the-counter pain medications - that a couple of pills can vanquish headache pain - is a false one, Spierings said.
"It's not just something that you can look upon as a nuisance," he said. "The meaning of headache is a signal, as is pain in general, that there is something wrong in the body."