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Nowadays, more often than not, work is related to spending long hours in front of the screen of a computer, and straining the eyes. Deadlines are hanging over our heads, we’re constantly in a rush, stressed, and there’s never enough time. All of this contributes to the occurrence of various, unwanted conditions. Headaches are one of them, they affect major part of the world’s population and are more frequent than asthma, diabetes, or even congestive heart failure.
Headaches are often accompanied by the upper back pain. In this case, it is necessary to understand the cause, examine the tissue functions – which can be involved, although not necessarily located in the head and neck area – and to introduce the proper treatment.
Insightful interview will enable the physiotherapist to correctly understand the issue, and will also enable him to start a best suited treatment for the given organism.
The treatment is non-invasive, so it is a good alternative for pain medications, which only suppress the real cause of said pain sensations.
Headaches and upper spine pains are caused by stress, increased muscle tension, disbalance of a chemical nature, or the intake of medication (as a side effect). Oftentimes, dehydration is also the creative factor.
Those causes, mentioned above, are partially responsible for impeding normal functioning.
To understand a given problem we have to delve into the case and determine what kind of pain is bothering us.
We can divide headaches into two categories:
Vascular and Tension headaches alike can have their roots in the muscles.
The most common case are the problems concerning the sternocleidomastoid muscles, scalene muscles, and suboccipital muscles (Rectus capitis posterior major and minor, and obliquus capitis inferior).
If those structures are the cause of pain, then radiation and occurrence of symptoms are located in the ear area, and often pass into temple, forehead, and temporomandibular muscle areas. Those structures are also co-creators of tinnitus (ear buzzing).
Another piece of the puzzle are the muscles responsible for straightening the head and neck. Their dysfunction is caused by the long hours spent in a sitting position, which becomes a hunched position over time. This order of things influences said muscles’ attachments on the spine, which are located in the places where the humps are most often created during sitting. This causes pain felt simultaneously under the head from the neck side, between shoulder blades, and in the middle of the back.
Those muscles are::
From the previous article concerning vertigo you could find out that vascular pains may be caused by the aforementioned structures, which influence how much blood flows through the arteries surrounding the head.
Nowadays, because of the sitting lifestyle, we encounter those problems very often. Working in front of the computer makes us tilt our head in the direction of the monitor which entails constant straining (overloading) of said structures.
Tensions within internal organs area may cause headaches. Persisting tension in the dura mater, respiratory muscles, and oesophagus will cause neck tension. The neck, in turn, will cause tension in suboccipital, scalenus, and sternocleidomastoid muscles which will result in a headache.
As a physiotherapists we encounter the cases of episodic headaches accompanied by constant, tiring neck pain on a daily basis. Thankfully, the progress and development of physiotherapy in the recent years allow us to use many techniques and methods of dealing with such problems. So, instead of being dosed with pain medications it’s better to visit a physiotherapist.