There is a sort of morbid fascination that many of us share about the several and varied disorders of the brain and mind. Case studies of loss — of memory, of names, of colour vision — fill publishers’ lists. I’m not talking about academic textbooks here, but trade books addressed to the lay public. Novelists write about the devastation wrought by Alzheimer’s disease in the minds of their mothers or lovers. Neurologists write about their patients, or thinly disguised variants of them, with Antonio Damasio, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Paul Broks, and of course the doyen of them all, Oliver Sacks, all taking up their pens to share their experiences.

Steven Rose

In this book, the editors have assembled a team of experts to present and discuss an important topic in the headache field — refractory migraine. Starting with the recently proposed criteria for defining refractory headache, and refractory migraine in particular, Schulman, Levin, Lake, and Loder have chosen headache luminaries to discuss some controversial topics related to the assessment and treatment of patients with headache that is difficult to treat and that is the biggest challenge for headache practitioners.

Abouch Valenty Krymchantowski