Here’s How Physiotherapy Can Help With Your Headaches

Headache Pain & Physiotherapy

Headaches can impact on our daily lives quite severely. Linda Shacklock, director of City Physiotherapy & Sports Injury Clinic on King William Street in Adelaide says that in her 22 years of treating patients, she has seen many patients who suffer from headaches and knows they are a literally a pain in the neck! Linda says, “Headaches can stop you from being able to focus on your work, cause all manner of neck, shoulder, upper back, face, head, jaw and ear pain and can affect your sleep. In the busy lives we lead we can often become irritable and short-tempered as we struggle to deal with headache pain and the stress of our daily lives.”

What causes neck headache pain?

Headaches are mostly caused by neck joint or muscle dysfunction in your neck. This is usually related to poor posture, muscle imbalance, muscle tension and stress or a combination of all of these factors. Headache pain can be referred from your upper neck nerve roots and specific segments of your neck, which then cause irritation to your nerves. Trigger points in your muscles can also cause you to feel headaches. However, headaches are complex and there can be other triggers such as disc, nerve tension, fascia, specific sleeping habits, and the way in which we deal with stress, just to name a few.

Can physiotherapy help my headache?

Headache pain originating from your neck and/or stress can be treated (and prevented) by physiotherapy. Health Partners physiotherapy provider City Physiotherapy has a special interest in helping to treat headaches without the use of drugs, as well as getting to the source of your headache pain. “At City Physiotherapy, our main focus is our patients overall wellness, so when you seek treatment for your headache we ensure that we get to the source of your headaches” says Linda.

It’s important that your physiotherapist considers all the aspects that impact on your overall wellbeing and musculoskeletal health, so that they can help you to start to take control of your neck and tension headaches.

“It’s vital that physiotherapy treatment and advice aims to address every component that contributes to your neck-related headache. Although it’s important, simply releasing tight muscles and loosening up stiff neck joints will not be sufficient to get to the cause of your headache pain. Your physiotherapist should assess your posture and muscle endurance, talk to you about your hobbies, exercise, sports, sleep, stress and tension,” states Linda.

Physiotherapy headache treatment may consist of a variety of hands-on techniques such as:

• joint mobilisation
• muscle stretching
• soft tissue release techniques
• dry needling for pain relief
• western acupuncture
• postural assessment
• muscle strength and endurance re-education exercises
• ergonomic assessment
• neurodynamic assessment and treatment of your nerve tension
• stress and tension management techniques including mindfulness-based stress reduction.

By seeking treatment for your headache pain from your physiotherapist as soon as symptoms arise, you can start to work together to reduce or eliminate your headache pain.  Even chronic headaches can be assisted with specific individual physiotherapy intervention and treatment. Remember that the take home message is that physiotherapy headache treatment should be a partnership between the physiotherapist and their patient, based on a multifactorial approach with the focus being on developing solutions to deal with the pain of headache for the long term.

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