Your Neck Pain
When you woke up this morning, did you cringe at that pain in your neck? Did you try to think back to something you had done the night before that caused that pain? Did you look around your bed for any evidence of having hit something during the night or perhaps sleeping wrong? You can continue to look for a cause to that pain in your neck, but there are several things that may have caused it.
We want you to be as informed as possible as to what could have caused that neck pain, so we’ll look into some common causes over the next couple of weeks. To begin with, we’ll look at some activities and injuries that could result in neck pain.
Activities that cause neck pain
Making the same movement over and over again, or making one prolonged movement, with the neck can cause a person to strain their neck. That means they are overstretching or overusing their neck muscles causing a sprain, which is a ligament injury, or a spasm of the neck muscles to occur. There are several activities a person might engage in that could lead to this type of injury, including the following:
- Stretching your head forward, or in another awkward position, and maintaining that position while doing various activities such as watching television, reading, or talking on the phone
- Sleeping with a pillow that does not support your neck properly, meaning it either props your head too high or causes it to lay too flat, or sleeping on your stomach and twisting or bending your neck
- Resting your head on your upright fist or arm for long lengths of time
- Using your upper body and arms for activities in which you overuse your upper body and arms, such as painting a ceiling or playing tennis
- The tensing of your muscles that connect the head, neck, and shoulders due to stress or too much focus
Upper Cervical and Your Neck Pain
It’s one thing to know what to do or what not to do in order to avoid neck pain, but it’s another thing actually to do those things or stop doing those things that cause neck pain. Start right now, and you’ll have a better chance of not waking tomorrow with any pain in your neck. We’ll look at injuries and medical conditions that might be the source of that neck pain next week.
If you are experiencing a sore neck, it may be due to a misalignment in your upper cervical spine. That means the best thing you can do is seek out the care of an upper cervical chiropractor. They will examine your upper neck vertebrae for any misalignments. It only takes a misalignment of ¼ of a millimeter to hinder the brain’s ability to communicate with the body, but an upper cervical chiropractor can restore that communication process by aligning those top two bones.
To find a Doctor in your area go to www.NUCCA.org or if you are in the Dublin, California area to schedule your NUCCA evaluation, click the button below:
Dr. Andrea Pritchett of Vital Life Wellness Center in Dublin, California is an Dublin Chiropractor and Upper Cervical Expert trained by the National Upper Cervical Chiropractic Association (NUCCA). Her upper cervical clinic also serves Pleasanton, Livermore, San Ramon and Danville. She is uniquely trained to correct problems in the upper cervical spine (upper neck). This vital area is intimately connected to the central nervous system and problems in this area have been shown to be an underlying cause of a variety of different health problems, including children’s conditions such as ear infections, colic and scoliosis and problems that adults face including migraines and other headaches, fibromyalgia, sciatica, neck and back pain, and more. More information can be found on our website at https://www.vlifewellness.com/