Shiprock Chiropractic | Neck Pain treated by Kenneth Wingrove Doctor of Chiropractics

KENNETH WINGROVE

CHIROPRACTOR

Neck Pain

Free From Neck Pain

Are you serious about stopping your neck pain?

If so then I may just have the answer to relieving your neck pain and even fixing it so it doesn’t return for a long time or ever again.

It helps to get a diagnosis from your primary care physician or chiropractor so you can focus on and treat the root issue. In assuming you have yet to get a diagnosis, I promise to do my best to give you several first steps that may relieve your neck pains.

Three Things You Can Do Now To Relieve Your Neck Pain:

Step One: Increase muscular flexibility

You can specifically massage and stretch the muscles surrounding the neck and shoulders. The best time to do this is upon waking up before you get out of bed. Perform your shoulder push downs and thumb glides. And then hop in the hot shower. It’s simple. And it has relieved hundreds of sore achy necks that suffered for years before they discovered these easy to do moves.

I recommend three moments in your day to set aside one minute to perform these moves. In fact, I think you’ll find it beats one 10 minute session any day because people usually stiffen up throughout their day as the sit or stand for prolonged periods.

How to Stretch to Relieve a Neck Crick

Here’s how to stretch to relieve your Neck Pain…

Shoulder Push Downs = Place your right hand on your left shoulder and press your shoulder downward until it feels as if it is being stretched tightly. Then point your nose toward the opposite shoulder away from the shoulder being pressed on. Feel the muscles that connect between the neck and shoulder stretch. As you feel comfortable to do so, look downward to increase more of a stretch. Hold for up to 30 seconds. Then perform the same stretch with the opposite hand pressing down on the other shoulder. Repeat the above steps two times.

Thumb Glides = Using both hands, place your thumbs at the base of your skull behind the ears on the tight muscles. Now you will glide downward toward the base of the neck where the upper back and neck meet. During the slow glide along the neck muscles, use your thumbs to mildly press inward on the tender muscles of the neck. Perform this glide several times to relieve tension in the neck.

Mad Cat & Old Cow = This move is an overall great motion for the Neck, Upper and lower back. Start easy and then gradually increase the stretch. Begin on the floor where you are propped up on your hands and knees, elbows locked. Now let the low back sag into a downward arch like an old cow. Hold for 3 seconds. Then, arch your back upward like an cat when it gets angry. And hold for 3 seconds. During this motion, you will tilt your head upward to look at the ceiling when arching the back down. And then flex your head down to gaze at the knees as your spine arches up like the mad cat. Switch between these movements five times.

Step Two: Focus on Your Posture

Most of our lives are spent in only three basic positions…sitting, standing or sleeping.

I’d bet that most neck pain sufferers are sitters. In fact, I’d bet that if you took a survey of people who suffer with any back or neck pain, you would find the majority of them sit too long. Sitting removes the spines shock absorption and presses nearly twice the bodyweight into the joints of the lower back. If you work in front of a computer, there is a good chance that your neck posture is made worse by poor ergonomics as the eyes tend to want to get closer to the computer screen.

We find many of our neck pain sufferers hold their necks forward far out in front of their shoulders placing increased stress on the discs between the neck vertebrae and straightening the natural curve of the neck. It also creates tension on the spinal cord and brain stem where the brain opens out of the skull to send nerve tissue down the spine and out to each organ and muscle.

Many of these sitters, drive home and continue sitting while eating dinner and watching television after a full day of sitting at work.

Now you're neck and back hurt. Bad. You do that six to seven days a week attending meetings, and trying to relax…And we wonder why we slouch and hurt more as we get older.

Age has nothing to do with it. It’s how we go about our day to day.

Even after your chiropractic adjustment, your massage, your ultrasound and your pain medications, it remains obvious that posture plays a major roll in how your joints feel, move and last.

Make time to lay down on your back and rest your neck from all the sitting. I promise it will help within only a few days.

How to Recover From Or Prevent a Neck Injury

Each of the steps listed above can prevent a neck injury or even help a recent neck injury recover relatively quickly. If you’ve injured your neck, place ice on the area that hurts for 20 minutes and repeat each hour that your are able.

Oftentimes we see neck injuries occur when there is a whipping motion of the head. The head is heavy compared to the neck. And the head will act as a pendulum when in a car collision or in another situation involving a jolt to the head. The head gets momentum fast during an accident and it will swiftly jerk and damage the neck joints.

Here are two moves that should be tested gently to improve upon after you’ve injured your neck…

Neck Range of Motion = Look over your shoulder on each side. Now tilt your ear to your shoulder. And do the same for the other ear and shoulder. Finally, bend the head forward to look down. And then bend the head backward to look up and back toward the sky. If there are any limitations then it would be wise to get help from your chiropractor or primary care physician. It is vital that you restore those motion ranges and without pain so your neck can continue working properly for many years.

Rest your head when available = When you drive, make the extra effort to keep your head against the head rest. Also, throughout the work day, rest your head against your work chair if your sit. If you work while on your feet, focus on keeping the head over your shoulders and not jetting forward in front of the shoulders. Finally, when you get home, I strongly encourage you to rest your head by lying down.

Step Three: Better Sleep

Ideally sleep should be on your side or on your back. If you sleep on your belly you typically have to kink your neck in order to breathe, which can impair your healing neck after an injury, and it can cause more neck pain and neck cricks.

If you choose to sleep on your side use a pillow that keeps the place of the spine horizontal to your bed. Back sleepers do not need a fluffy pillow that jets their head forward after hours of staring at the computer.

One option for a pillow I recommend is to find a water pillow. It has all the normal components of a pillow, but then you can fill the back side with water to provide horizontal support while side lying and then the weight of the head will push the water out of the way so it can rest in a perfect position when back lying too.

Feel free to use multiple pillows to prop your body in an almost-on-your-side position.

Find a mattress that provides firm support for the spine but feels soft to lay on. I do not recommend a pillow top mattress as the thick pillow top tends to break down fast in the spots that contact lots of weight from your body and it can cause future back pains and neck pains. Each season you should rotate your mattress to preserve the wear and tear to prolong it to it’s lifespan of approximately ten years. If it gets to the point that you need a new mattress but cannot yet afford one, then see if you can prolong your purchase by placing a plywood board between the mattress and the box spring for firmer support. Nearly 1/3rd of our lives are spent in bed, so if you wake up with neck or back pains, the first thing to look at and to replace may be your mattress.

The Chiropractic Solution For Neck Pain:

Chiropractic is considered one of the top choices for relieving and fixing hurt and sore necks.

Chiropractic does not use drugs or medications. It does not involve surgery. We can certainly work with individuals who have undergone surgery. As a licensed chiropractor, my training specifically focused on locating and correcting structural imbalances in and around the spine. I use my hands and other tools to adjust and manipulate the spine gently so the individual being worked on can heal and recover effectively and efficiently. Following a successful pain relief, if my patient wants to actually fix the joint and stop further flare-ups, I often prescribe exercises and therapeutic modalities to improve joint, and surrounding muscle and ligament stability. Improper biomechanical motion between the vertebrae irritates the spinal nerve and disc, leading to back pain, neck pain and future injury, our aim is to restore health to the nerves and discs.

Because we specialize in relieving back and neck pain, and we work with hundreds of patients suffering from these symptoms each week, we are confident that we can help an individual’s neck recover from an injury as long as the issue is a chiropractic issue. How do you find out if your issue is a chiropractic issue? Just let us know you have neck pain and we’d be delighted to meet you for a consultation to discuss your pains and discover whether we can help or not.