Alan Rapoport, MD, Neurology Reviews Editor-in-Chief, Named President of the International Headache Society
BOSTON—Alan M. Rapoport, MD, became the President of the International Headache Society (IHS) at the semiannual meeting of the International Headache Congress in Boston on June 29, 2013.
Dr. Rapoport is a Clinical Professor of Neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA in Los Angeles and has a private practice at the California Medical Clinic for Headache in Santa Monica, California. He is the Founder and Director-Emeritus of the New England Center for Headache in Stamford, Connecticut, and the Founding President of the Headache Cooperative of New England. He has been practicing neurology since 1972 when he started in Stamford and Greenwich, Connecticut.
“My goal for the next two years is to spread headache information and education around the globe through effective communication and teaching,” said Dr. Rapoport. “An informed headache patient can help the doctor to get an accurate history, make the right set of diagnoses, and give optimal treatments. Unfortunately, most general and family physicians and many neurologists have not been well trained in headache care, and patients often go to several doctors, having multiple tests before getting relief. The other problem is the lack of headache specialists worldwide. Even in the US, there are only about 400 headache experts for a population of about 310 million people. In many other countries, there may be just one or two doctors interested in taking care of headache patients.”
The International Headache Society is a charity based in London charged with improving knowledge about and treatment for headache worldwide. It works closely with the American Headache Society and its 36 Million Migraine Campaign, a newly launched initiative dedicated to increasing the national research investment in migraine and raising public visibility for one of the world’s most disabling disorders.
Dr. Rapoport has been involved with the International Headache Society since the first meeting in Germany in 1983. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the president of his class. He went to medical school at the Downstate Medical Center of the State University of New York, and did his internship at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn and his neurology residency in Manhattan at the Mount Sinai Hospital. He served his country for two years during the Vietnam War and was a surgeon in the Public Health Service stationed at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He has more than 250 publications, posters, and chapters to his credit and has co-authored nine books on headache for physicians and patients. He is an editor of Headache and CNS Drugs and is the Editor-in-Chief of Neurology Reviews. He reviews manuscripts for many peer-reviewed journals such as Neurology and the New England Journal of Medicine.
He is the cofounder of a start-up nonprofit company named ProMyHealth.org, which is a website for headache patients where a patient can have his or her history taken online by an expert and receive a detailed letter to take to his or her doctor with an accurate headache history, set of clinical impressions, and list of red flags that will help to save time, increase accuracy and effectiveness, and lead to better outcomes.