The Pain of Headaches

Headaches and migraines plague 4 million people every day. But could there be something more effective than just popping ibuprofen after ibuprofen that could help reduce and even eliminate this daily pain? Chiropractic care just might be the best step for you!

Hello everyone! Dr. Bob here from Lowcountry Chiropractic! I hope you are all doing well. Through this week's blog, we are going to be talking about headaches. Headaches plague the majority of us in the US. I don't know many people who have never had a headache before or who don't have them on a somewhat regular basis. We are going to talk about headaches and how to manage them or eliminate them if possible. Now, there are two basic types of headaches. There are migraine headaches and tension headaches. There are others too, like cluster headaches, etc. But for all intents and purposes of this blog, we are going to be focusing on the tension headache because they are the most common. Migraine headaches tend to be a little more difficult to manage because a lot of the time they are hormonal or chemical in nature.

Let's talk about tension headaches. Those are the headaches where usually you wake up fine in the morning, but as the day goes on you start feeling pain in your temples or the front or back of your head. Sometimes they go away on their own, and sometimes you take ibuprofen and they go away. These headaches are very common and most people suffer from them. What causes a tension headache? They are usually caused by a vascular problem, meaning the blood vessels. These blood vessels are found in your head and brain. If the blood vessels in your brain are dilated, they will take up more space in your brain and put more pressure on your head. That can cause headache pain. If the blood vessels are too constricted, the blood flowing through the walls of those blood vessels puts a lot of pressure on them and can cause headache pain as well.

How do you manage a tension headache? We in chiropractic believe that chiropractic care is one of the best natural ways to control tension headaches. Why is that? Well, if you remember, the nerves that come out of your spine, and there are many of them - 62 to be exact - those nerves control and regulate your body.  These nerves come off the spinal cord and run through the openings between the spinal vertebra called foramen. If one vertebra is a little out of place (called a subluxation, as we've discussed in previous blogs) it can pinch or irritate a nerve and affect the transmission of the messages from your brain to the rest of the body. In the case of tension headaches, we are talking about message interference with blood vessels. If you have subluxation, it could constrict blood vessels or dilate these vessels, resulting in headaches.  So subluxations are a very common cause of headaches. If you have a subluxation in your neck, these muscles will get tense and tight and start pulling on the back of your head, and that can create a lot of tension and headache pain as well.

A chiropractor is trained to realign (or adjust) these spinal bones, get pressure off the nerves and allow the body to function as it should. In this case, blood vessels go back to their normal size and the headaches go away. We've had tremendous success in this office helping people with headaches.  We've had people come in who have had headaches their whole lives and after they get adjusted several times, their headaches disappear. It's pretty cool!

The medical model for treating headaches is to prescribe medication that can reduce headaches, but it doesn't correct the cause of those headaches. You will continue to get headaches and continue to take medications to minimize those headaches and that is just a vicious circle. Chiropractic care gets at the cause of the problem. In this case, the cause of the problem is the subluxation or that irritated nerve. So when you adjust the bone and get the pressure off the nerve, good things begin to happen.

I hope that this helps you. If any of you are suffering from headaches and you want to get rid of them naturally without taking medications, just call us!  We will do a very in-depth examination and if I feel that I can help you, we will get started right away and get those headaches gone. I hope the rest of your day is good, and we will see you for our next blog!

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