Many people believe it is normal to suffer from frequent headaches. If you share that opinion, it is probably because you personally experience headaches all too often. To you, “normal” is just something you can expect. Unfortunately, your normal includes feeling like your temples are caught in a bench vice.
It’s time to change your definition of “normal.” Barring a number of medical exceptions, headaches are treatable by chiropractic care. The majority of chiropractors frequently manage patients who experience migraine headaches. In fact, physical therapy (including manual therapy) is the world’s most popular alternative treatment for headaches!
What Causes Headaches?
Certain foods and beverages can trigger headaches. Alcohol is unsurprisingly on that list, although you may be surprised to learn that even blue cheese can give you a headache. (Don’t let that discourage you from enjoying the occasional Buffalo wing).
Eating cheese aside, there are many things you could do if you actually wanted to get a headache. Sitting all day with bad posture will do the trick, as will craning your neck down to stare at your phone for long periods of time. Injuries and other chronic issues can cause headaches as well.
If you have headaches for any of those reasons, it is because your body isn’t functioning in its ideal condition. Put simply, the joints in your vertebrae aren’t correctly aligned, which in turn places harmful pressure against surrounding nerves, ligaments and other soft tissues. Furthermore, misalignment of your spine can cause your body to produce neuropeptides. They are the naturally occurring protein which causes neurogenic inflammation – precisely the symptom you would call a headache.
Can Chiropractic Care Help With Headaches?
Chiropractors do not offer the only treatment for headaches. If you suffer from migraine, you may opt for surgery that targets several facial nerves. More than a few medications are prescribed to people who suffer from chronic headaches as well.
We aren’t going to challenge how effective those treatments are. We will only point out that surgery and drugs are both large, intrusive health interventions. Either can come with serious side effects, which is one of the greatest reasons why people are drawn to chiropractic care for headaches. Chiropractors don’t make incisions. They can’t prescribe medications. They only work with the body’s own natural healing processes, which is often all that is needed to alleviate or eliminate headaches.
A chiropractor takes a natural, biomechanical approach to treating migraine, tension headaches and neck pain. Once they have assessed their patient’s spine to determine the locations of misaligned vertebrae, they create a treatment plan that targets those subluxations. A chiropractor then uses manual therapy to gently reposition their patient’s joints into proper alignment. This process, which is known as spinal manipulation or adjustment, is performed on the neck and possibly the back depending on the patient.
Returning the body’s joints to their optimal alignment restores the body’s biomechanics. When it functions in its best condition, the body stops producing the neuropeptides that cause inflammation within the brain. Manual therapy can also naturally reduce the body’s production of cytokines, which are proteins that cause inflammation and pain once they have built up inside the body.
Chiropractic Care Goes Beyond Manual Therapy
A chiropractor approaches each patient with the goals of relieving pain, improving function, and promoting the body’s natural potential for self-healing. As such, they have more methods for treating headaches than manual therapy alone. These include:
- Diet – Your chiropractor will explain how you can eat a healthy diet which limits your body’s tendency to produce inflammatory hormones and neurotransmitters.
- Exercise – Your chiropractor will teach you low-intensity exercises that promote a natural anti-inflammatory response from your body. Exercise can also decrease inflammatory agents within the body if it results in weight loss.
- Posture – In addition to adjustment, your chiropractor can teach you how to maintain a healthier posture while avoiding slouching and forward head translation.
- Stress Management – It isn’t secret knowledge that yoga, meditation and other calming activities can help reduce stress and resultant inflammation. Your chiropractor will recommend additional ways you can healthily relieve headache pain!
Reducing and eliminating discomfort from migraine and other chronic headache conditions is only one way we help our patients here at Fargo Spine. Our doctors regularly create safe, gentle and drug-free personal treatment plans that address the core roots of a wide range of physical conditions. If you would like to learn more, then we welcome you to schedule a consultation at Fargo Spine’s chiropractic clinic in Fargo, ND today!