How Your Spine Health Affects Your Chronic Headaches

Headaches are among the most common medical complaints worldwide, with data showing more than half the world’s population experiences headaches regularly. An occasional headache can take a toll on your daily routine, but when headaches are chronic or recurrent, the effects can be debilitating and life-altering.

Many issues can cause or contribute to headache symptoms, which is probably one reason why headaches are so common. What most people don’t realize is that many headaches emanate from problems with the spine — and correcting those issues can provide significant relief from pain.

At Kerinver Chiropractic, Josue Maysonet, DC, helps patients control headache frequency and severity through hands-on techniques focused on optimizing spine health and function. Here, learn how your spine affects headache pain and what chiropractic care can do to help.

Chronic headaches and your spine

Chronic headaches can occur 15 or more times per month for three or more months. Data show about 40 million Americans suffer from chronic headaches, including migraines, tension headaches, cluster headaches, and headaches with no discernible cause or specific classification. 

Your head is perched at the top of your spine, so the relationship between spine health and headache pain isn’t surprising. The bones of your upper spine (the cervical spine) comprise your neck, helping to hold your head upright and supporting normal head movement.

Your spine is also home to your spinal cord, a long bundle of nerves responsible for transmitting signals between your brain and every other body part. Nerves exit the spine via spaces between your vertebrae — spaces maintained by cushioning discs.

Typically, your vertebra and the discs between them “line up” to form the spinal canal, the long tube that contains the spinal cord. If a disc or bone in your spine is out of alignment, it can irritate or press on nerves where they exit the spine, resulting in pain and related symptoms anywhere along that nerve path, including your head. 

Treating spine-related headaches

When it comes to headaches, misalignments are typically associated with the bones and discs in your cervical spine or sometimes the spine in your upper back. Often, alignment problems are related to poor posture or muscle strain in the neck, upper back, or shoulders.

Spending hours bent over a phone or keyboard causes neck pain and headaches, but other issues can play a role, too. Carrying a heavy bag, poor sleeping habits, and a sedentary lifestyle can hinder spinal alignment.

Chiropractic treatment uses special hands-on alignment techniques to gently bring vertebrae and discs back into their proper positions, relieving inflammation and irritation that leads to chronic head pain. Therapeutic massage targets tight, inflamed muscles that relieve tension from inflammation and nerve irritation.

In addition to hands-on therapies, Dr. Maysonet helps patients adjust personal habits that may affect their posture and spine health. Relieving stress, gently exercising the neck and shoulders, and improving workplace ergonomics all play essential roles in helping reduce your headache frequency and severity.

Relieve your chronic headache symptoms

Don’t let chronic headaches rob you of your health and happiness. To learn how holistic chiropractic care can help, request an appointment online or over the phone with the team at Kerinver Chiropractic in Kissimmee and Lake Nona, Orlando, Florida, today.