General information
Pain in the face is incredibly varied, so that without a more detailed description and examination, it is difficult to determine the cause. First of all, facial pain must really be related to the face, i.e. cheeks, jaws, cheeks, temples up to the ears, the mouth and nose area, the area around the eyes and all associated bone and cartilage. This also includes the area around the tongue, throat and palate.
Headaches are clearly separate from these areas – although it can of course happen that someone suffers from face and headaches at the same time. If your forehead hurts in connection with a headache, this also belongs more to the category of headaches. One can distinguish between different forms of facial pain, depending on how the patient describes it.
Whether it is chronic or acute, whether a connection between the pain and certain situations or moments can be recognized. The localization of the pain in its strongest form, whether and if so, where it radiates to. The extent of the facial pain in particular could give an indication of whether the pain originates from a particular nerve and spreads along it, which would manifest itself in typical pain areas.
Causes
The most common and important cause of facial pain is neuralgia, which is a pain originating from the nerves and is often described by those affected as very severe, suddenly shooting and drilling or cutting. The pain is usually classified as a 9-10 on a pain scale of 1-10. The pain can occur spontaneously or be triggered by certain stimuli, such as touch, heat, cold or even light.
The best known form of neuralgia occurring in the face is probably trigeminal neuralgia. A problem in the therapy of such neuralgia is that most of the classical painkillers have no effect on it. For this reason, the therapy mainly uses active ingredients that are also used to treat epilepsies (anticonvulsants), for example carbamazepine.
If the symptoms are not satisfactorily relieved, local anaesthetics or surgery may be considered, depending on the cause. The underlying cause cannot always be found. This includes, for example, irritation of the nerve by a blood vessel adjacent to it, sometimes an underlying disease can also be responsible for the pain, a head injury, multiple sclerosis or a tumor.
