When Your Job Becomes A Real Headache, See Your Chiropractor

If you get frequent headaches while at work, it may not be because of a demanding boss or difficult co-workers. There are a number of ways that your work can cause pain and irritation of the nerves in your neck and back. This results in the tension headaches and pain in your neck and shoulders that make you reach for the aspirin. Your chiropractor can show you what is happening and help relieve the pain and stiffness. Here is what you need to know about those annoying work-related headaches.

Simple Things You Do at Work Can Cause Headaches

The muscles around the top two vertebrae in your spine surround nerves that travel up into your head, around your neck and down into your shoulders. If those muscles become fatigued, they can contract and become inflamed. If pushed to work harder, they can spasm. This irritates the nerves running through the muscles, which translates into pain in your head, usually in the temples. You can also experience pain in your neck and shoulders. A number of things can stress those neck muscles including:

• Sitting with your head held still for long periods, such as when staring at a computer monitor. The neck muscles become fatigued from holding your head in a constant position. This is especially the case if you must look down slightly to see the screen, which puts more tension on the muscles than holding your head straight and looking forward.
• Performing a task that requires you to repeat motions, such as looking up and down, as on an assembly line. Repetitive motion injuries result from overusing the neck muscles without giving them a chance to rest.
• A combination of movements which exerts sudden stress on tense muscles. For example, you've been studying a company report on your desk for a couple of hours and your neck muscles have become tense. You reach for something on the far side of your desk as a co-worker comes into your office. You turn your head to speak with them and feel a pull and sharp pain in your neck. The combined stress of reaching and twisting on already irritated muscles can tear muscle fibers, causing pain and swelling.

How Your Chiropractor Addresses These Painful Muscle Issues

Your doctor will offer a number of approaches to relax the neck muscles, reduce the swelling and relieve the pain. These non-invasive treatments are done in the office as an outpatient, making it easy to stop in at a clinic like Gillette Chiropractic Center after work or over a lunch hour to get relief.

• Spinal Manipulation - Repeated stress on the vertebrae and muscles at the top of your spine may result in a misalignment of the bones, called a subluxation. This puts the muscles and nerves under constant stress until the bones are put back into their natural position. A manipulation of your spine may be needed to coax the vertebrae back into alignment, removing pressure from the muscles and nerves.
• Active Release Techniques - In this treatment, your doctor feels for the tense muscles in your neck and massages them in their normal direction of movement to get them to relax. If there are muscle spasms, steady and direct pressure can be applied to the muscle with the knuckles or a special tool to relax the muscles and stop the spasms.
• Physical Therapy - This uses a number of range of motion exercises to put the irritated muscles through their normal movements. Swollen, contracted muscles become stiff and you may find that you can't move your head and neck easily. Physical therapy slowly stretches out the muscles to get rid of that stiffness.

You may find that after a few sessions, your pain is gone and you know more about what you can do at work to prevent the muscle irritation. Taking breaks from staring at the computer screen reduces the neck tension. Or you may have a job where repetitive neck injuries often happen. Then it's nice to know that you can go to your chiropractor and get rid of the nagging neck pain and headaches whenever they do happen.