12-24-2025, 03:54 PM
I've been suffering from increasingly frequent and severe headaches for the past year, and my primary care physician suspects they might be migraines, but he's hesitant to give a formal diagnosis without a neurologist's evaluation. The problem is the wait time for a specialist in my area is over six months. In the meantime, I'm trying to understand the formal migraine diagnosis criteria to see if my symptoms align while I keep a detailed headache diary. For those who have gone through this process, what specific symptom patterns, triggers, and associated features (like aura, nausea, or light sensitivity) did your doctor emphasize as key for diagnosis, and are there any red flags I should be documenting that would warrant pushing for a sooner appointment or going to urgent care?