How Chiropractic Care Can Help your Tension Headaches!

Do you struggle with headaches regularly? Chiropractic care is highly recommended to help with your headaches! You don't have to suffer anymore, let chiropractic care help you!

Hey everybody! It's Dr. Bob Salamon here with Lowcountry Chiropractic and another exciting blog! I hope you are staying safe and well out there! Today, we are going to be talking about something that affects many people worldwide daily, and that is headaches! Hopefully, through this blog and what we are going to be talking about today, I can help give you some information on how to combat your headaches naturally! There are many different types of headaches out there; classic migraines, common migraines, cluster headaches, tension headaches, and many more. Each of these different types of headaches is caused by different things. Migraine headaches will have onset symptoms that appear before getting the actual pain in the head like sensitivity to light, floaters in your eyes, and auras. Each of these early-onset symptoms acts as a warning to an individual that a massive headache is on its way. Migraine headaches are a little more complex in general because they're usually related to some hormonal or chemical imbalance in the brain. Today, we are going to put migraines to the side and talk about tension headaches.

Generally speaking, tension headaches are headaches that will progress as the day goes on. You may wake up feeling great, but as the morning wears on into the afternoon, you start to get a headache. You might feel the pain in your temples, behind the eyes, or maybe even in the back of your head. These headaches may or may not require you to take some medications to help you get through the rest of your day. Let's talk about tension headaches and their causes. Primarily tension headaches are vascular, meaning they are caused by the changes in your blood vessels or capillaries in your brain. Your capillaries carry blood to and from your brain, and the pressure on the walls of those tiny capillaries is really important. If you have too much pressure on the walls of your capillaries, it can cause inflammation. That inflammation, as we all know, can cause some serious pain. Tension headaches can also be caused if the capillaries in your brain expand, causing your blood vessels in your brain to make up more space, resulting in serious pain as well.

Do you know the "normal" amount of headaches that your body can suffer every week? Zero! No headache is normal, and there is no such thing as a "normal" headache or a "normal" amount of headaches to have every week. I have so many patients that tell me that they get "normal headaches" about 2-3 times a week. This isn't a normal thing to experience, we are shooting for zero headaches every week! If you're getting more than zero headaches every week, it might be time to find a new way of dealing with them and preventing them!

Back to blood vessels! What controls the sizes of these blood vessels in your brain is the nerve supply. Remember that every organ, blood vessel, tissue, gland, skin cell, and everything in your body has a nerve supply that comes out of the spine and spinal cord. If that nerve is somehow inhibited, meaning there is pressure on that nerve or it's pinched in some way, the signal from the brain is not getting through to that nerve as it should. In these situations, isn't it conceivable that maybe that blood vessel could dilate because it's not getting the right supply? Or, conversely, could that blood vessel constrict for the same reason? The answer is yes to both of these questions because interference with nerves can either speed things up, slow things down, enlarge things, shrink things, and stop things from happening as they normally should.

To ensure that these blood vessels are the proper size and you have the proper amount of blood flow going through those vessels in the brain, one of the things that helps with tension headaches is chiropractic care! How does it help? What chiropractors are trained to do is to take the pressure off the nerves that may be pinched because a vertebra or a bone in your back is out of place. My job is to analyze where in your spine the bones are out of place, called a subluxation, putting pressure on nerves and affecting a lot of things in your body. Subluxations can get in the way of every system in your body, along with creating the tension headaches we are talking about today. My job is to correct those subluxations with my hands so that those nerves are freed up and they start working properly. This allows the blood vessels to go back to their normal size and help the headaches go away!

The other alternative to help with your tension headaches is to take medication. The medication that is out there can solve the problem short-term by removing some of that inflammation off the blood vessel. Just like any medication though, it doesn't correct the cause of the problem.  If the cause of the problem is a subluxation of your spin and irritated nerves, the medication can't fix that problem. Chiropractic aims at fixing the problem that's causing these symptoms. Also, every medication has side effects. Looking at the list of medications that are out there for headaches, one of the side effects of long-term use of anti-inflammatories is that they can lead to liver damage! This liver damage is just one of many side effects connected to this medicine! If you are using medication regularly to help with your tension headaches, you might want to consider chiropractic care because the results are incredible and you can avoid those side effects.

If you come into our office to help your headaches, we will do a complete exam, go through your medical history, give you a full consultation, and we will take some X-rays to see where those subluxations are. If I can feel where those subluxations are or what is causing your headaches, we will get to work right away working to fix these issues causing you pain. Chiropractic care is an all-natural treatment for headaches and there are no medications involved. If you're struggling with headaches and you want a new approach from the one you're already using, look us up! We would love to help you. I hope all of this information helps! Don't forget, I'm Dr. Bob and I've got your back covered! Have a great day, and we'll see you soon!

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