Every adult has experienced a headache at some point. However, headaches vary greatly in frequency and severity. Most people can self-diagnose their own headaches and often turn to over-the-counter medications to help relieve the pain. However, doctors do not have any set of tests to diagnose headache types and causes. Instead, they mostly rely on the description that patients give them, and typically, the descriptions of the symptoms of headache pains vary wildly.

For the past 2,500 years, aspirin has been a stable in cultures all over the world for treating headaches. Hippocrates, the famed Greek doctor in 5th century B.C., extracted aspirin from the bark of a willow tree as a way to reduce fevers. The aspirin extracted from the willow tree bark has salacin, a chemical that the body converts into salicylic acid. Towards the end of the 19th century, Bayer, a German pharmaceutical company, introduced acetylsalicylic acid (or simply aspirin) that was made by Felix Hoffman, a chemist. Aspirin is a very widely used product, with more than 80 billion tables of it sold annually. It s one of the most popular over-the-counter medications for headaches used today.