Headaches are not normal

Many suffer from headaches and those who do usually have a couple of different causes acting simultaneously. For some they are debilitating and others, a nuisance. If you are using things like Ibuprofen and Tylenol, they are affecting your quality of life more than just a little bit. If you have the big bottle of Ibuprofen, that's too much.

I'll first walk through the mechanism of almost all headaches and its solution. After, I'll share the signs of the type of head pain that requires emergency attention.

The only pain sensitive things in your head are the blood vessels and the covering on your brain and spinal cord called the meninges and the lining of the sinus cavities in the forehead and face. Correcting these problems usually gets rid of headaches.

One sided headaches are the easiest to solve. They are caused by the top cervical nerve being irritated and that nerve goes up the back and side of the head. People rub their temple and squint their eyes when this pain is severe. This is the easiest to correct by realigning the spine with an adjustment.

The Frontal area headache can be the next nerve down, C2 and that gets irritated by the same misalignments of the spine. The good news is if misalignment or subluxation causes it, adjusting it can correct it. The frontal area can also be from sinusitis and allergies. This is slightly more complex but also can be helped. This usually requires some change in nutrition to correct.

The back of the head headaches are what people call stress headaches. This is the most common. It's caused by severe subluxation and alignment problems in the neck and upper back leaving the head slightly forward of the shoulders. That's the stress. The load of the weight of the head on the upper back and neck muscles simply wears them down and by afternoon, you feel the tension up the shoulders and into the back of the head. The solution to this is re-aligning the head back over the body. We have to implement some home exercises to help correct this, but it's also very doable.

The cause, whether it's the top nerve, C1, the 2nd or C2 or the 3rd level or C3, or some combination of all three, the solution is to restore the normal alignment. It's relatively easy if you're 15-20 years old. It becomes increasingly more difficult to effect a permanent correction 4 or 5 decades later, but I've seen it happen for people.

Lastly, some get concerned that a headache could signal a tumor or a stroke. This is less than 1% of headaches. I don't have an exact number but it's probably less than 0.1%. Here's the signs of those but these are so rare and the person who this happens to usually has a significant recent onset with no prior history of headaches. That's not a rule, but may be helpful for those getting anxious about their headaches. In addition, tumors and strokes generally don't come with head pain. Only after significant mass of a tumor starts shifting the brain around are people aware that there's a mass. In other words, years into the process. And, there's other signs in the cranial nerves, face, tongue, etc.... that point to a specific area of damage in the brain. I can tell you only once in my 34 years of practice, did someone with a headache, end up having a mass inside the head from a brain bleed and injury months earlier. Everyone else has neck derived headaches. I've had a number of people with brain tumors and they literally do not have an awareness of head pain. So, that may be comforting while you're sitting there with a headache wondering whether it's a tumor. It is really, really unlikely.

99% of headaches are caused by subluxation and alignment of the neck. If you know someone suffering, please tell them about us. We can help. We love to help people in this situation because compared to something like sciatica, the results for headaches are much quicker and long term, better.

If you know someone suffering, send them to our office in Oakdale. Here's our phone 651-777-3611

Dr. Barrett

Dr. Fleming