Neck Pain and Headaches.

If you spend a lot of time sitting at your work desk or staring at a screen, then chances are that you’ve started to experience neck pain or headaches.  

You know that you don’t have the best posture - your shoulders round forwards and you hunch over a little too much. This is a presentation that we see all the time at Lift Physio (as well as other causes of neck pain).

Neck pain conditions we treat include:

  • Disc Related Neck Pain

  • Whiplash

  • Acute Wry Neck

  • Cervicogenic Headaches (headaches that stem from your neck)

Neck Disc Pain Treatment

A bulging disc can occur in the neck when part of the disc moves out from between the vertebral bodies.  This can occasionally cause compression on a nerve root which can send pain, numbness or tingling down your arms.  

Disc bulges can occur suddenly, or slowly over time. The good news is that discs can heal really well and rarely require surgical intervention -  and they respond very well to physiotherapy.

Whiplash Treatment

Whiplash injuries result from a fast flexion-extension movement (back and forth like a whip) such as in a car accident. This injury can cause painful muscle spasm around the neck as the surrounding muscles try to protect the area.  Pain can often persist even when imaging results come back without abnormal findings.  Early access to physiotherapy after a whiplash injury can be a game-changer in reducing pain and symptoms.

Wry Neck Pain Treatment

Your head is stuck in a twisted position - What's going on?!

Acute wry neck can occur in anyone, but is seen most commonly in children.  Often this is caused by muscle spasm down one side of your neck, or the facet joints in our neck becoming “stuck” - restricting your ability to turn your neck.

The key to improving wry neck is to get those stuck facet joints to move properly again - that’s something we can help with.

Headache treatment

There are 3 main types of headaches, including migraine, tension headaches, and cervicogenic headaches. Cervicogenic headaches originate from your neck - commonly the top three spinal segments O-C3. These headaches are often associated with neck pain and stiffness and are aggravated by sustained postures and specific neck movements. The good news is that treating the neck with Physiotherapy can often quickly resolve these headaches.

VIDEO: Exercises To Improve Posture

What can Lift Physio do to help?

When you first come and see us at Lift Physio, there’s a few things we’ll do.  We’ll ask you a few questions because we want to fully understand your problem and what your goals are - what would you like to get back to that you can't do right now because of your neck pain or headache, for example.  We also want to get you feeling and moving better as quickly as possible. Some of the tools that we use to do this include:

  • Manual therapy

  • Spinal mobilisations (for example, freeing up some of those stiff “Facet joints” we talked about)

  • Soft tissue massage

  • Dry needling

  • Gentle “therapeutic” exercises (maybe some gentle stretches, roller/massage ball exercises)

And we’ll also develop a treatment plan with you so that you can know what to expect from us, your expected recovery timeframes, and what we’ll need to do to help you get back to 110%

Then once you start feeling and moving better, we’ll have a chance to get to the bottom of your problem and really understand its main cause.  Where appropriate, we like to do this through one of our “Super Assessments”.

This is a one-hour dedicated assessment where we go deep to understand the true cause of your problem - assessing everything from your muscle strength and power, mobility and flexibility, balance and motor control, as well as any other factors that may be relevant for you. (We use some pretty cool, high-tech equipment to help us do this, too).

Once we’ve looked through the data, we can then come up with a tailored exercise program just for you, to address the underlying problems that we have found - because we want this problem gone for good.