Category: Headache

Chiropractic Care and Headaches

Nine out of ten Americans suffer from headaches, with 13% of the population experiencing debilitating migraines that come in the form of extreme pain, nausea, disorientation, and a complete inability to function. Headaches have a habit of running in families, and even if you’ve never had a headache before, work, school, and general stress can bring on that throbbing bane of existence that makes you lock yourself up in a dark room to wait it out. Even then popping a pill to relieve the pain might not do it.

Chiropractic care is a scientific practice that focuses on the human body’s natural ability to heal itself. By making adjustments and applying hands-on treatment to work out the misalignments and imbalances within the body, it eliminates pain, discomfort, difficulties with mood, and helps provide relief for injuries. But chiropractic care is for car accidents and broken necks, not headaches, right?

On the contrary. If you’re looking for relief and long-term results, then this treatment can provide the fix.

Types of Headaches:

1. Cluster Headaches

Cluster headaches are a strange but intense sort, with a propensity for showing up mostly at night. What makes them so disruptive is that, unlike other headaches, they appear in extreme bouts that last from a few minutes to an hour and will continue to appear up to four times a day for several days. You may have a cluster headache that lasts a week, disappears, and then reappears several months later with no obvious sign as to what caused it.

2. Tension Headaches

These are the kind that most people experience. When you work too many hours, your posture begins to go sour and forces your spine into poor shape. Staring at a bright screen day in and day out strains your eyes and causes the blood vessels in your head to inflame. Dealing with a stressful situation such as a surprise bill or a bad family dinner makes your muscles naturally tense as a defense technique, disrupting the joints of your neck or upper back. Each of these cases leads to your very own tension headache, where you’ll feel a pressure on either side of your head and around your eyes in a dull ache. This can last for thirty minutes or several hours, but are the least intense kind of headache and can be muscled through.

3. Migraines

The atomic bomb of all headaches, migraines are the variety that stop life in its tracks. They usually begin like a tension headache, which prompts many to try and muscle through on their own without seeking medication or rest to head off a migraine at the pass. For some of the 25 million Americans who experience migraines, nothing can be done to prevent them once they begin. They’re characterized by the sharp throbbing behind your eyes that can eventually become intense enough to make you lose balance and even your eyesight. This is accompanied by waves of nausea and an extreme sensitivity to sound, and in some cases can be warned of by random flashes of light behind sufferer’s eyes along with disassociation-like symptoms.

4. Ear Infection Headaches

Especially common in children, ear infections can also afflict adults, caused by an imbalance of fluid in the ear which creates inflammation and results in unfriendly symptoms such as a stiff neck, irritability, fever, and especially headaches. A headache caused by ear infections are especially prone to making you feel dizzy and disoriented, such as with a more intense tension headache, with some cases bringing on more extreme migraine-like symptoms.

How Chiropractic Care Can Ease Them

1. Preventing Nerve Pinches That Block Brain Signals

Your nervous system is comparable to the motherboard of your computer. Small, intricate, but undeniably in charge of every complex aspect a functioning computer has. Yet should a fall or bump shift one of its small workings slightly out of place or some component within lean too hard on another, progress is thrown off or halted entirely, leaving you with a poorly operating computer.

When a disc or vertebrae in your neck is misaligned, then it can pinch nerves that are then blocked from carrying the signals from your brain to the rest of your body. This disruption can cause poor signals to be sent and improper ones to received, and the jumble it creates internally is responded to with pressure building in the head – resulting in a headache. With chiropractic care, regular adjustments can be made to shift these discs or vertebras back into their proper alignment, so pinched nerves are relieved and proper signals can return.

2. Aligning Joints to Ease Tension

When your joints seize and muscles become tense due to stress or as a natural reaction to the spine being out of alignment, your body is working harder than necessary to compensate for its most vital portion being out of place. This not only causes ache across the body, but triggers headaches, which are a result of that tension turning into pressure in the brain. Chiropractic care will make precise adjustments that shift your points back into line, so muscles are not required to work harder to make up for the strain. The pressure is then taken off your brain, eliminating headaches and putting your body’s structure in a healthy place to handle the burden of stress in the future without causing a physical reaction.

3. Adjusting Vertebra to Provide Better Balance

Ear infections in particular are caused by an imbalance of liquid in the head, which causes dizziness, disorientation, irritability, and a general lack of function. Your spinal structure also requires balance in order to operate at its peak ability, and chiropractic care is focused on bringing he body into its natural alignment. By making adjustments to ensure your spinal structure is properly arranged, you can experience relief from ear infections, avoid them in the future, and in the very least, have the headaches reduced. Your body will naturally balance out your levels now that your spinal structure is properly set.

4. Providing Practices to Ease Headaches

Chiropractic care is about taking away the roadblocks which prevent your body from healing itself. With this in mind, you’ll not only receive treatment to help ease your body back into alignment, via therapy techniques and massages to help reduce tension and prevent misalignments, but your chiropractor will also provide you with practices you can apply at home to keep your body in its best form. By working out the tension or pinched nerves that cause headaches on a regular, small-scale basis, your body will be more receptive to care and less likely to follow a poor pattern, keeping headaches at bay and improving your overall health.

Headaches are a product of something being out of sorts in your body – and a rather vicious way of letting you know about it. While sometimes a dark room, rest, and pain killers can relieve the symptoms of a headache, it’s not a long-term solution and in some cases not effective at all. By visiting a chiropractor today, you can not only find relief from the harmful side effects of genetics, tension, or ear infections, but prevent them from happening in the future.