So, what if tomorrow you woke up and didn’t have a headache ever again? So many patients that I see suffer from headaches, migraines, sinus headaches, headaches from all sorts of different things. If you woke up tomorrow and didn’t have another headache ever again, what would you do differently with your lives?

Hi, I’m Dr. Chris Hood from Hood Chiropractic, and today I’m going to give you three simple things you can start doing right now, if you have headaches, to start making them better. The first thing is, there are different types and causes of headaches and all of us have those, but the type I see the most common right now, this years, is what we call cervicogenic headache. And when I say cervicogenic, I don’t mean women’s body parts here. I mean cervical, like, neck cervical spine. I know it sounds crazy but right now we’re living in a technology world where everyone has something we like to call techno neck. From texting all the time, people on computers all the time, my average patient will spend seven to eight hours a day on a computer. When you’re in that posture and your head is forward like that…I’d like you think of your muscles in the back of your neck, to your traps, to the mid of your arms all the way up to your eye are contently trying to pull your head back.

So, the majority of the headaches that I currently see now in my office are caused from the repetitive stress of people being on the computer for long periods of time, texting, techno neck, the posture of looking down. You know that old age posture where you see people get into? You’re going into the posture prematurely and don’t even realize it. It’s going to cause headaches, neck pain. Okay! Headaches! What do we do to reverse that?

Number one, at the end of a long day, you’ve been working hard, you’re that person playing video games, on the phone, or you’re just at work all the time, and you’re in that computer posture. Reverse that posture! At the end of the long day go ahead and lay your head off the end of the edge of the bed. I know it sounds crazy but if you were a little kid like me and use to read those ‘choose your own adventure books’ maybe I’m dating myself but saying that, basically when you read upside down when you’re a kid, that’s what I want you to do. I want you to put your shoulders off the end of the bed, lay your head back, put your arms at your sides and take a couple of deep breaths in and just relax. Let those muscles relax, let your spine relax, you’ll be able to decrease the amount of muscles spasms in the back and start working on your posture and it’ll start calming those headaches down. That’s number one

Number two if you have a headache and the headache is getting worse and your trying all these other things, do yourself a favor, don’t put heat on it! A lot of people will get in the shower, start to stretch their neck out start to stretch their head out, that’s going to make things worse. Lite ice, the way you want to do that, most people never taught you this before, they’ll say “yeah ice this” but no one knows how, right? Wet paper towel on your bare skin, the back of your neck. Because the muscles are pulling, remember the cause of that headache, those symptoms, that techno neck, wet paper towel on your bare skin, ice pack on the wet paper towel, you can use a bag of peas, bag of carrots, I don’t care, just something icy. 20 minutes only! When you put it on its going to be cold, it’s going to burn, it’s going to ache, it’s going to go numb. 20 minutes pull it off there, between the icing and the stretching should calm it down immensely, so those are the first two things if you’re getting headaches, it’ll help.

Number three Ergonomics. Listen guys you can’t help it in our modern society using technology and I get that, my patents see that. I go out of my way to help my patients with lifestyle modifications so you know so that they can get better quicker. So, what we want to do here, is when you’re at work, a couple basic things. The monitor of your computer should be at eye level or above. Most people are on a laptop now a days, so they’re looking down the whole time. You want it eye level or above, so you’re looking up putting your spine into that natural curved position. That naturel curved position brings your head over your shoulders. You also want to make sure you’re drinking plenty of water during the day, in our modern fast paced society a lot people are using those highly caffeinated beverages, coffee, just to get through the day, and every time you drink a caffeinated beverage it actually acts as a diuretic and you lose water, and chronic dehydration guess what, causes headaches. So, that’s the forth thing!

So, let’s review what we’ve talked about. Number One, you want to stretch your head at the end of the day, right off the bed and let those muscles relax that are going up into your head and your neck. Number Two, you want to go ahead and ice it, if it’s really a problem, if you have a bad headache and you ice it down a little bit in the back of the neck you’ll feel better right away and on top of that, you’ll know it’s coming from the muscles of the neck

Number three, right, Ergonomics. Ergonomics at work. be aware, if you have no choice at work but to be on a laptop or posture down that way then do yourself a favor, ever hour or so get up stretch with your head back, three deep breaths in, stretch you upper back and neck it’ll help

And number four, of course, drinking plenty of water. I meant to do three, we did four here. It’s an extra bonus, it’s for free! So, the forth one, what you’re going to do, drink plenty of water. You want to do three liters a day, that’s 6 bottles of water a day. I know what you’re going to say “Dr. Chris! If I drink that much water I’m going to have to pee a lot,” Good! You’ll get more excurses walking back and forth to the toilet okay. So, there’s an extra health tip you didn’t even expect. So, at my practice when I see patient with headaches, what I tend to see in our society is that their head is starting to translate forward from their body because of technology.

So, as you translate forward, you can actually see this on an x-ray, so when people come in my office that have chronic history of headaches, and you know it’s not allergy related and you know its tension and stress headaches, and you know where it coming from, that type of posture, we take an x-ray, it’s the only way we can determine if the spinal bones are misaligned. When the spinal bones are misaligned because you trained them to get in this forward astray, old age nursing home posture prematurely, right, cause you’re in your 20 or 30s and you’re in this posture the muscles are in spasm, the only way to identify that is with a digital radial graph or an x-ray. So, we take a normal x-ray and in an x-ray. The spine should have this normal curve where your head is back over your shoulders, when you get that techno neck or that hump in your back and the head forward it causes headaches.

So, the goal and care in my office is to correct that, bring the posture back into normal alignment through general adjusting and some really basic exercises in the office and at home so that we can get to the cause of the problem. The headaches are being caused by abnormal posture and abnormal structure we correct the posture put it back to normal, correct the structure.  Your body heals, functions and operates the ways it’s supposed to. SO, those are your tips today,

I’m Doctor Christopher Hood from Hood Chiropractic. I hope that helps with the headaches. More importantly if there’s anything we can do to help…It’s all good in the hood here at Hood Chiropractic. Have an amazing day, it was good taking to you.