Neck Pain/Whiplash

Muscle Tension Headache

One of the more common complaints of family practitioners seen in practice is neck pain.

Neck pain can be caused by direct trauma like car accidents, poor posture, sleeping in uncomfortable positions, and muscle strain from staring at a computer screen for hours. The most common complaint is literally pain in the neck, worsened by certain movements of the neck. These neck pains can be associated with headaches which usually start early in the morning in the back of the head and eventually wraps across the front of the forehead, with tightness associated with muscle tension headaches. It also turns out that up to 70 to 80% of all migraines are precipitated by a muscle tension headache event.

Why do the pains occur?

It certainly can because by tired muscles or “muscle sprain or strain”. And often people literally have a “crick in the neck”, where the vertebrae in the neck actually are slightly malaligned.

Patients can go to chiropractors to get their necks adjusted, and that could help. Osteopathic physicians generally use much less force to manipulate the neck, and we can also prescribe most relaxers or anti-inflammatories if they are necessary, especially in cases where the neck pain persisted for a significant amount of time and all the muscles are “tight”.

Over the past three decades, I have developed very gentle manipulation techniques to treat the neck, and some of them have been used safely in the elderly. I go through these techniques in the private section of this site.