Techs Neck or Bad Posture Treatment in Hackettstown, NJ
One of the more frequent questions we get asked is about Techs Neck. Years ago, we used to call it bad posture. Now, with iPads and iPhones, everyone is walking hunched over all day, and we now call this "Techs Neck". How can this affect your body and what can we do about it?
It is a pretty important problem. We used to see bad posture as people got older. Now we see it in younger and younger folks as the first generation grows up with iPads and iPhones.
So a little explanation. When we look at the spine from the side, we have curves on the spine. The lower back curves in, the middle back curves this way, and the neck curves back. And that is how we stand up nice and straight. Now, when we look at the spine from the back, we want it to be nice and straight. To the side is scoliosis, which is not a good thing, and this is something else we can help with. From the side, we should have nice curves, kind of like this model here. When we sit looking at iPhones and iPads all day, what happens in the front of the neck is it starts getting flattened out at that curve. What this does is put a lot of extra pressure on the back of the neck.
So one of the ways we are able to assess it here is we have a digital posture assessment program. What we do is take pictures of you, and we are able to analyze your posture once we are done. Let us see for example one of the staff here. We take a front view. We want to see if everything is in nice alignment; the shoulders, hips, chest, eyes. This is where we can evaluate your alignment without X-rays. On the bottom is the lateral or side view where we can see those curves we are talking about. So we've got the ankles, knees, hips, shoulders, ears that should be in good alignment. We can see on this staff member that her ears are quite a bit from that front line. It shifted about 1.2 inches which does not sound like a lot. Her head weighs, according to the software, a little over 10 lbs., 10.9 lbs. We shift that head and neck forward about 1.2 inches forward. That should be the effect of carrying around a 24 lb. head all day. That is too much stress for someone this size to carry around and it can cause neck pain or headache.
So what that it should look like if we take our model again; the curves are all nice and steady. We can put a lot of pressure on that and it is pretty steady and probably pushing you down all day. But if we have that neck bending forward, putting straight pressure on it, we can see what will happen in the spine. It puts a lot of pressure on to your back here. So it tends to cause a lot of neck pain, headaches, different symptoms up in that area of the spine with this bad posture.
Chiropractic care makes the alignment better. It is a great method. Doing some rehab and physical therapy exercises to help strengthen those upper back muscles to hold this upright. Because unfortunately, during most of our daily lives we are leaning forward all day. It is important to have good posture for healthy breathing, and it is just one more problem seen in modern society called Techs Neck. Thank you.
To find out more about Chiropractic vitality care in Hackettstown, NJ, contact Village Family Clinic.
