A treatment diary answers a practical question: what happened after you took something, from your point of view? It cannot establish a drug's effectiveness for you on its own. Use the record to describe your experience to the person who prescribes or reviews your medicines.
Record each use clearly
Write the medicine name, dose and time, then note when the attack started and how you felt about two hours later. If pain returned or you took another dose, record that too. Migrelle lets you link an intake to an attack and answer follow-up questions at two and 24 hours. Its Treatment Lab cards summarize repeated entries; they do not rank medicines or advise a change in treatment.
Count days as well as doses
Medication-overuse headache is a clinical diagnosis with several conditions, not a number on a phone screen. ICHD-3 describes use thresholds of 10 or 15 days per month, depending on the acute medication class, over more than three months alongside frequent headache. Migrelle counts distinct days with any recorded medicine and shows an orienting 10-day marker; it does not distinguish acute from preventive medicine or determine whether diagnostic criteria are met. Ask your clinician which medicines and days matter for your situation.
Look at longer trends
For a preventive plan, bring monthly headache or migraine-day counts from before and during treatment, along with dates when your plan changed. Changes in sleep, stress and other care may happen at the same time, so a before-and-after chart alone cannot attribute a result to one medicine. Keep a note of side effects and concerns to discuss; do not stop or adjust a prescribed medicine based on this article or an app chart.
Bring the record to a clinician
A concise medication list, days of use and your notes on relief can be more useful than a pile of unstructured entries. Migrelle's 90-day PDF report includes medication days and recorded medicines; it is generated on your device. For a simpler routine, see our medication tracker overview.
