Condition of the Week: Tension and Migraine Headaches
Dr. Tyler Carlock, DC, returns today to continue his series of videos designed to educate our patients (and the general public) regarding common painful conditions. We want all of you to know that The Village Family Chiropractic and Multi-Specialty Medical clinic here in Hackettstown stands ready to provide you non-surgical and drug-free pain management treatment of these common ailments. Today, Dr. Carlock returns to the subject of headaches, this time with specific focus on tension and migraine headaches.
How’s everyone doing out there? This is Dr. Carlock, chiropractor here at Village Family Clinic with another public service educational video. So we’re now addressing some of the questions that we get in this series. I’m going to stick to the headache topic because that’s what I’ve been talking about for the past couple of weeks now. We’re going to talk about what are the different types of headaches? Alright. So there’s really two main ones. I’ll touch on some other as well, but the two main types of headaches are tension and migraine.
So really a tension headache, another way to describe that is cervicogenic, meaning it’s coming from the neck, alright? So a lot of times the muscles surrounding the neck will get tight and pull on the head, and that could cause a tension type headache band around the whole head there. The pain can also go around your ear, and you could feel some on your shoulders. That occurs from stress, it occurs from forward head posture, being sitting at the computer all day, looking down your phone. So a lot of it is caused from posture, some of it can be caused from stress. That’s the main type of headache that we have a lot of success with treating. If we can get the cervical spine moving properly, loose up some of those muscles, that tends to relax some of those headaches and get good results with those.
Migraine is another common one that people tend to complain about. You know it can be a little bit more painful and a lot of times migraine pain will be kind of one sided. It will typically be right behind the eye. It’ll be on one side of the head and kind of behind the eye. It can either accompany an aura or without an aura. Aura is light sensitivity, you might get dizzy and things of that nature. And it can be brought on by certain things, certain food, certain taste, smell, and again stress. There’s no definitive research that states exactly where migraines originate, but we have lots of success treating migraines again mainly focusing on the cervical spine.
Something you can do at home to ward off or reduce migraine pain is to make sure you’re drinking a lot of water. They say that about 80% of headaches will feel better if you just drink one tall glass of water. Make sure you’re properly hydrated. Make sure your diet reflects foods that you’re not sensitive to because that can trigger somebody’s migraines as well. Exercise is very important, focusing on good posture as well.
So if you’re suffering from any of these headaches, definitely come and give us a call and we’ll help you take care of them. A few other ones that may occur, there’s cluster headaches, those are very rare, about 1% of the population and it’s a very, very, intense, intense, intense pain. They’ve described as people actually commit suicide, that’s how intense the pain is and it’s like over a certain hours and many times a week. That’s very rare, I personally have not seen a case of that yet. That’s the three kinds of headaches for today’s discussion. So like I said if you suffer any of these symptoms, give us a call and we’d be sure to help you.
Thank, Dr. Carlock ! So to remind you all, we provide a wide variety of chiropractic, physical therapy, and other pain mitigation services here at our Hackettstown Chiropractic clinic. Our goal is to not only mitigate/eliminate your pain but more importantly to identify the root causes of your pain and to develop a treatment plan that gives you the very best chance of eliminating that pain forever. Stop suffering and make an appointment today so we can get you out of pain and back to doing the things you love.
