TENSION HEADACHES
These headaches are named because they are coming from your muscles being tighter than they should be and causing pain in your head. These are the main headaches that WE treat. They are SUPER common! And they can feel so intense that you think you are having a migraine!
These headaches show up in a few different patterns.
-
It can feel like a band, across your forehead
-
It can feel like a squeezing at the base of your skull, where your head and your neck meet.
-
It can feel like tightness and pulling up one side of your neck, behind your ear, and moving over into the temple, and behind your eyes
We classify headaches as either Primary or Secondary
-
If it’s primary, then the problem exists in the head itself
-
Tension Headache is the most common Primary Headache
If it’s a Secondary Headache, then the problem exists somewhere else. One good example of that is a cervicogenic Headache
When you press on your muscles in your shoulders or your neck, can you recreate the headache?
Have you had a massage and it only helped for a little bit, or it didn’t seem to help at all?
CERVICOGENIC
Cervicogenic means that it’s coming from the neck
-
It can be an issue in what is called the Suboccipital triangle, which is a space at the base of your head where nerves exit the spine that go to your head and face and neck.
-
It can be an issue with the bones in your neck (Cervical dysfunction) which can irritate the head, the face, the neck, and even the covering around the brain!
-
It can be a muscle referral, where muscles in your neck, and even your shoulders can irritate the nerves in your head, face and neck!
