Cervicogenic Headaches

What are they?

• Cervicogenic headaches are decreased movement in cervical (neck) joints and muscles that refers pain from the neck to the head causing aching pains that can wrap all the way to behind your eyes. 

Why do they occur?

• This can be caused by many processes from chronic poor posture to acute pains such as sleeping awkwardly, tension in shoulders, clenching and grinding your teeth and more. 
• Another cause of these headaches can also be motor vehicle accidents when whiplash has occurred.

How can chiropractic help?

      In office, Dr. Richelle Demers and Dr. Dan Bruner can use different range of motion identifiers, orthopedic and neurologic tests to determine if this is truly a cervicogenic headache.  

      They will use whats called motion palpation to determine what what specific joints are not moving. By knowing this, they can then apply specific chiropractic adjustments to these areas.

     The doctors also check the muscles in the area to identify what specific muscles may be referring pain to the head as well. The muscle tone is also checked to see if you have trigger points (knots in the muscles), muscle adhesions, hypertonicity (increased muscle tone) or hypotonicity (decreased muscle tone). By treating both the muscles and joints in the same appointment we can decrease the frequency of visits with faster improvement in headaches and pain. 

      Muscle and postural exercises will then be prescribed for the patient. This gives the patient the ability to continue to improve on their own and strengthen the area for decreased chance of the headaches returning!

Research supporting chiropractic care for cervicogenic headaches: 

If you've been to our office, you know we love research and updating our treatments to reflect scientific supported methods! Bogduk and Govind (2009) described cervicogenic headaches, reporting where exactly they have been reported to occur through nerve blocks in the neck and the treatments and effectiveness of them. They described that the most common cervicogenic headache comes from the C2-3 joints in the neck and that there have been no drugs that have been effective in the treatment of cervicogenic headaches. They also reported that "manual therapy and specific exercises used together was more effective at reducing headache frequency and intensity..." and with regular treatments "At 12 months, 72% had a more than 50% decrease in headache frequency..." (Bogduk and Govind, 2009). If you want to check out this article it is available for free through Google scholar with the reference below. 

Nikolai Bogduk and Jayantilal Govind. Cervicogenic headache: an assessment of the evidence on clinical diagnosis, invasive tests, and treatment. Lancet Neurol 2009; 8: 959–68.