Hi Carol and welcome to the forums.

Rashes can be a side effect of ibuprofen - Multimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!!  You need to or .

However ibuprofen is just about useless for treating CH. It will not touch the pain of a CH and being a tablet it takes too long to be absorbed into the bloodstream. There are much, much better ways to treat CH.

First off, he needs a preventive which will cut down on how many CHs that he gets. Verapamil is very effective, typically a dose of 360-480mg a day (much higher than used for blood pressure) with some people going as high as 1000mg a day. Other options include lithium and topomax.

Most preventives take a while to become effective, so a doctor will normally start someone on a prednisione taper dose for 10 days or so to work as a short term preventive.

Once a CH starts, he needs an abortive to kill off the CH rapidly. What works great for most people is breathing oxygen via a non-rebreather mask at a high flow rate (15lpm or higher). This is how I can abort my CHs in about 5 minutes. Imitrex injections also work great but are expensive and you are limited to how many you can use per day (unlike oxygen).

Since he is using ibuprofen for CH it strongly suggests that his doctor is not at all experienced with treating CH. Ideally he needs to see a neurologist who specializes in treating headaches as even standard neurologists get little training in headaches. This should make a huge difference to how well he is treated.

Other things to try are using vitamin D, which is having an amazing effect for a lot of us. Read about this at Multimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!!  You need to or . It's a lot to read but it is worth it.

Energy drinks, like Red Bull, taken at the start of a CH can also help reduce the intensity and duration.

Keep reading as there is so much to learn about CH here. You'll soon learn more than most doctors.

And ask LOTS of questions

AppleNutClusters, you just might be onto something. That looks almost exactly like how he breaks out. And he always goes to bed, under the comforter. I told him, next headache, no getting under the comforter.

Mike, he's a Veterans Administration patient as he is 100% disabled from Vietnam. Asking to be referred to a neurologist and actually GETTING referred are usually very different things, but we will try again.

He was on Cafergot, which is a combination of ergotomaine and caffeine and it worked wonderfully for many, many years, until the VA decided that it was "too old" and "not effective" and removed it from their list of permitted medications.

I'm sure some of the US based people will have some advice on how to deal with the Veteran's Administration.

However CH is something where you need to do all you can to get the treatment needed. Just relying on doctors to sort things out gets most people nowhere quickly other than more pain.

Cafergot was one of the treatments of choice many years ago, however now there are much, much better options, as I wrote in my post. Moving onto some of them should help a lot.