My neck feels fine, why should I bother seeing you?
It seems odd, but 30% of successfully treated cases at Melbourne Headache Centre had no neck pain and another 40% only reported mild tightness under the base of the skull.
You will have had the experience of having a massage or physiotherapy on other parts of your body, and the therapist pushes on a spot that until that moment, you weren't even aware was really painful.
Our brain has an amazing ability to 'ignore' painful messages so even though parts of our body can get very tender, we can be unaware of it.
Well, the body is a strange 'machine'. For example, pain or numbness in the foot or lower leg is often the first sign of a lumbar disc or nerve compression problem in the lower back. In many cases, the patient won't have tightness or pain in the lower back. Similarly, having ‘flat feet’ or fallen arches can contribute to muscle and bone symptoms at the ankle, knee, hips and lower back, ye the feet themselves are usually symptoms free.
There is an 80% likelihood that you have a poorly recognised and misunderstood fault in the top of your neck that is causing irritation of the 'headache centre' in the brainstem.
Symptoms driven by problems in the neck can look identical to all forms of headache and migraine, even including migraine with aura and menstrual migraine.
The common problem underpinning all types of headache is an overactive trigeminal nucleus (in the brainstem).
The techniques we use are proven to treat this overactivity.
During your initial assessment we look for three key signs that we can help you:
You have the small fault in the top of your neck
That we can quickly (within 20-30 seconds) change this show showing the cause and that its reversible.
That this fault is causing your symptoms - this involves stressing the top three segments of the spine to temporarily reproduce and then ease your head pain.
If we find these three things we can treat you. The initial treatment block requires 2 treatments per week for 2 weeks to establish the changes and correct the fault in the top of the neck. After this initial 2 week block we see significant changes in over 90% of people. We then typically discharge to self management over the next 2-3 sessions. If you have not had your neck assessed using the only hands on techniques specifically developed to test and treat the relationship between the neck and headaches then you may be suffering unnecessarily.
