Migraine & Headache Companion
Last updated 24 August 2026
This page cannot help in an emergency. If you have a sudden worst-ever headache, weakness, trouble speaking, vision loss, confusion, or a stiff neck with fever, call your local emergency number now — 911 in the US and Canada, 999 in the UK, 112 across much of Europe and from most mobile phones worldwide, 192 in Brazil.
Email is not monitored around the clock, and nothing here is medical advice. For anything about your own symptoms, treatment or medication, speak to your clinician.
Email seth@ndph.org for bugs, questions, feature requests, or anything about your account and data.
This app is built and maintained by one person, so replies usually take a few days rather than a few hours. It helps if you include your iOS version, your iPhone model, and what you were doing when something went wrong. Please do not send screenshots containing your health data unless they are necessary to show the problem.
Settings › Export my data. You can export the whole diary or a date range you choose, as a CSV file that opens in Numbers, Excel or any spreadsheet. The file is generated on your device and goes wherever you send it.
Your data is yours and is never locked in. Column values stay in English regardless of your app language, so a diary remains analysable if you switch languages or hand it to someone else.
Open Share with Clinician and tap Generate PDF report. It produces a short PDF with your headache-day trend, a pattern heatmap, current medications with any overuse flags, possible triggers, your latest MIDAS score, and any warning signs the app has noted.
The PDF is created on your device. Nothing is sent anywhere until you choose to share it by AirDrop, email or a patient portal — and once you do, this app's privacy policy no longer governs it. Have a look at what it contains before sending.
Syncing uses your own private iCloud, so it needs the device to be signed into an Apple Account. If it isn't, the switch is deliberately disabled rather than left on doing nothing.
If you turn sync off yourself, it stays off. We will not switch it back on.
With Sync with iCloud on, install the app on the new phone, sign into the same Apple Account, and your diary appears.
With sync off, the diary lives only on the old device. Export a CSV first (see above) and keep it somewhere safe — an encrypted device backup also carries the data across, but a plain reinstall does not.
There is no account on our side to close, because there is no server. We hold nothing to delete. Export anything you want to keep before you start — deletion cannot be undone.
Check Settings › Reminder permission in the app. If it does not say Authorized, tap Enable reminders, or allow notifications for the app in iOS Settings.
Also worth checking: Focus modes and Scheduled Summary can hold notifications back. All reminders are scheduled locally on your device — their contents are never sent to us or through any server.
With Settings › Sync to Apple Health on, the app writes your headache episodes to Health, and reads sleep, heart-rate measures, activity and cycle data so they can be compared against your headache days.
The exchange happens entirely on your device under Apple's Health permissions, which you control in the Health app and can revoke at any time. We never receive it.
Set it yourself in Settings › Emergency number. The app suggests a starting number from your device region, which is a convenience and not a guarantee — please confirm the right number where you actually live or travel, and update it if you move.
Taking acute headache medication on too many days a month can, over time, make headaches more frequent. The published limits differ by drug class — 10 days a month for triptans, ergots, opioids and combination painkillers, 15 for simple painkillers and anti-inflammatories.
The app counts your logged days of use against the limit for the class you picked, and tells you when you are near or over it. That is a prompt to have a conversation, not an instruction. Do not change or stop a medication because of something this app showed you — talk to your clinician first.
The app compares what you log against warning-sign features taught in neurology, and separately against published criteria for common headache types. Both are educational: they show you how your own records line up with a pattern, and prompt you to seek care sooner.
Neither is a diagnosis, and neither is triage. Diagnosis needs a clinician, your full history, and the exclusion of other causes. If the app flags something that worries you, that is a reason to make an appointment, not a reason to delay one.
Only if you switch on Weather & air quality. It sends your approximate coordinates — deliberately coarse, at roughly kilometre level — to Apple Weather and to Open-Meteo, to look up barometric pressure, temperature, humidity, UV, air quality and pollen so weather can be examined as a trigger.
Nothing about your headaches, medications or health is sent with it, and no identifier travels alongside it. Turn the feature off and no location leaves your device at all. Full detail is in the privacy policy.
The app is available in English, Brazilian Portuguese and Latin American Spanish, and follows your device language. It supports Dynamic Type, and includes a migraine mode that dims the screen, removes animation and lets you log an attack in two taps.
If something is unreadable, unreachable with VoiceOver, or reads oddly in your language, please write in — that is a bug, and translation corrections from native speakers are genuinely welcome.
Email seth@ndph.org. Useful things to include:
If the app crashed, iOS may offer to share diagnostics with developers — that report contains no diary content and is genuinely helpful.
What this app is. A diary and a patient-education tool. It records what you tell it, shows you patterns in your own data, and produces something you can hand to a clinician.
What it is not. It does not diagnose, treat, or provide medical advice, and it is not a substitute for professional care. Its warning-sign checks are prompts to seek care — never a reason to delay it.