Still Having Headaches?

Headaches? 

Have you ever wondered why your headaches keep returning? You can take a pill and it helps but quite often you end up feeling like a zombie for days afterward. There is a good chance if this sounds familiar that your headache could arise from the suboccipital nerve being crushed by the occipital bone. If the headaches or migraines are bad enough the occiput can be putting pressure on the base of the brain stem which goes through the foramen magnum a hole in the bottom of your skull. Sounds pretty bad and I am sure the headaches are bad however, you can do something about it. The good news is that it is fixable in many cases with a method called the occipital lift.

 How Do Headaches Start

Here is how your headache can be started. We are all spending way too much time on screens these days. Be it your laptop,  pc screen, or your phone. There is a tendency to draw your head forward this is called forward head posture. Seems innocuous that watching any screen could do any damage or cause so much pain. Consider this, the position of your head with the head leaning forward exerts 3.6 times more force than is required to maintain the same position with a straight standing posture. What does this does do to strain the neck muscles? A lot, The overactive and shortened muscles participating in forward head posture and rounded shoulders are the deep upper cervical extensors which include longissimus capitis, Splenius Capitis, Cervical Multifidus, Upper Trapezius and Shoulder protractors and elevators which include Pectoralis minor, Pectoralis major, and Levator Scapula. So a simple approach like a pill will only afford temporary relief of headaches due to forward head posture.

 Neck Muscles associated with migraine headaches

We could go for hours about the actions of all the muscles listed. The important thing is to remove pressure from the brain stem by repositioning the occiput. This will take the pressure off the aforementioned muscles by re-balancing the way the head sits on top of the spinal column. As a chiropractor, I encounter this all day long. With a patient lying face down it becomes painfully obvious which side is creating all the tension and stress. Left untreated it is not unusual for patients to feel dizzy or have periods of confusion or conscious awareness that doesn't seem normal. Seems headaches gmaps embed are more involved than you thought?

I can assure you that a pill won't help this as easily as the occipital lift method. The more chronic the tension is you risk further serious symptoms like difficulty swallowing or saying words due to loss of muscle control after damage to the nervous system this is called dysarthria. Your headaches have to be severe to have dysarthria.
 
So to put in layman's terms go see a chiropractor for migraine headaches if you want to have help with those nasty headaches you may be pleasantly surprised.