ABSTRACT
Common to any medical problem, understanding emerging treatments or proposing new strategies is facilitated by a grasp of the anatomy and physiology of the relevant body systems. Pain is an excellent example of this principle, and headache a typical case in which basic information can greatly enhance therapeutic understanding. Newer therapies are covered elsewhere in this volume (see Chap. 61), so here I will concentrate on a neurobiological framework for these treatments. Fuller descriptions of the basic issues (1) and the clinical picture have been recently published (2,3). To set the issues in context it is appropriate to outline very briefly the clinical problem and then deal with the anatomy and physiology that can explain much of what is seen in practice.
