The Secret to Cervicogenic Headaches

BOOM!

You were just flung forward but luckily you were wearing your seatbelt. Regardless it’s impossible to ignore the fact that your head whipped forward and back before you even knew it. 

You look in your rearview mirror and realize that the car behind you is a little too close and your trunk seems to be messed up. It’s quite obvious that you’ve just been rear ended by someone. Everything is a little blurry but you’re shaking, your heart is beating extremely fast, and it takes a minute to figure out what to do next. 

You exchange information with the person who rear ended you and get on with your day and figuring out how to get your car fixed.

The next couple of days you figure will be normal but then you realize that your neck is super sore! You take some ibuprofen and ice it for a little bit and it gets better. Eventually days turn into weeks and you’re still having some neck pain, which turns into months, and potentially years. 

Neck pain and headaches start becoming a normal part of your everyday life. 

It’s difficult to sleep, you start struggling with work, and it’s hard to live a normal life!

This is something that happens to tons of people every year. It can be classified as a whiplash injury but that injury can cause what’s called cervicogenic headaches. 

What’s a Cervicogenic Headache?

A cervicogenic headache is attributed to a headache accompanied by neck pain and stiffness. Oftentimes they develop on one side of the head starting toward the back of the head or neck and radiating forward. Although it is similar to a normal headache, the fact that there is neck pain and stiffness does differentiate it a little bit. A normal headache is usually tied to some sort of nervous system or a slew of other things. 

If there is something going on with the structure of the neck, that’s going to cause there to be some muscle imbalance eventually leading to pain being sensed by the nervous system and causing everything to not work properly creating a cervicogenic headache. Now there are some treatments out there like medications, ablations, as well as nerve blocks but a lot of people don’t want to have to keep getting these over and over again for the rest of their lives as they are mostly a bandaid for what’s actually going on. Nowadays there is more and more of a movement to not have to be dependent on medications for a lifetime. 

At The Specific Chiropractic Centers that’s something that we specialize in! We don’t think that medications are bad, or that medical doctors are terrible people. Rather we think that if we can get to the cause of the problem, address that, and get the body working how it’s supposed to then we’ll see a decrease in symptoms and a decrease in dependency of medications. 

How Do We Help?

Now this is really how we differentiate from everyone else in healthcare. Our focus is both on the structure of the body as well as the nervous system. A couple vital pieces of information we need in order to help someone is to see if everything in their neck is working correctly and if their nervous system is working properly. 

This is why we take a very specific set of neck x-rays. We actually put the person into motion to check and see if these bones are moving how they are supposed to or if they’re getting hung up in some certain spot. As we know a cervicogenic headache is caused by issues in the neck area but also nervous system issues going on causing the symptom of headaches. 

In most people with cervicogenic headaches we’ll see an issue in the upper neck area, either C1 or C2 is not positioned or moving correctly. These bones have a bunch of muscles and ligaments attached to them. If they aren’t positioned correctly then those muscles and ligaments have a strain put on them. This strain causes pain in the neck area which can travel into your head and cause a headache. The nervous system controls this pain sensation which is why doctors will recommend a nerve block, to basically paralyze these nerves. 

Like we mentioned before a lot of people are trying to get off of medications and that’s how what we do at the office helps out. By using x-ray and infrared thermography to measure the nervous system we’re able to determine what bone is misaligned and how we need to correct it. By providing a specific adjustment we’re able to align the bone how it’s supposed to along with helping the nervous system work at 100% and decrease that strain in the neck as well as decreasing headaches. 

If you’re someone who struggles with cervicogenic headaches I hope you understand that you do have an option when it comes to relief or resolution. Cervicogenic headaches may feel like they come on slowly but there is usually an event that causes a misalignment in the upper neck area. This event may have happened months ago or years ago where you don’t even remember it. It doesn’t always have to be something like a sudden car accident mentioned earlier. Regardless of what people think may have caused their cervicogenic headaches or neck pain in general, they need to know that there is a long term fix for them that doesn’t require medications for life. At The Specific Chiropractic Centers we focus in working with the neck area and make sure that everything is aligned and the nervous system is working how it’s designed to work. If you or someone you know is struggling with cervicogenic headaches don’t hesitate to reach out. You can give us a call at 262-361-3160 or click that schedule button at the top of the screen. We can schedule a time for you to check out the office and it will give us an opportunity to learn more about what you have going on and see if we can help you out. 

Learn more.

Here are a few more posts on how chiropractic care can help those who suffer from headaches and/or migraines.