Your Neck and the #1 Cause of the Most Common Headache
| Most Common Headache | 00:06-00:20 |
| Tension Headaches | 00:21-02:29 |
| Sensitized Stress System | 02:30-05:38 |
| Why Do Headaches Occur in the Head | 05:39-08:48 |
| Adjustments Fight Headaches | 08:49-11:12 |
| Magnesium and Headaches | 11:13-14:04 |
| Why You’re Not Supposed to Have Headaches | 15:05-18:11 |
| Summarizing What We’ve Learned | 18:12-18:45 |
| Next Week Hump Day Conversation Ideas | 18:46-21:55 |
Bedford Chiropractors Discuss Most Common Headache Causes
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:00:06] So let’s go ahead and we’re going to bring up this topic that we have tonight, which is Headaches. Number three, on probably the most common things that we see in the office, number one, we said was low back pain to neck pain for sure, and then followed by a quick third is going to be headaches.
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:00:23] Yeah, so the type of headache that I’d like to talk about is probably the most common type of headache that you’ll see, and it’s called a tension-type headache, and it’s characterized by diffuse, mild to moderate pain in your head that’s often described as a tight band feeling around your neck. And you can see the red on the individual to the right. There you can see how it looks sort of like a tight band just above the eye in some of the pain can even be distributed around the ear and into the traps as well, because some of that distribution of pain is similar and can be caused from issues that are arising from the neck as well.
Most Common Headache Causes – Continued
Dr. Ben Boudreau: And it is the most common type of headache that increases muscle tension, which is a common symptom of tension headaches, maybe the result of a sensitized pain system. Now, this is what they think is the cause of tension-type headaches. Just give me a second. We’re going to talk about this for a minute. Sensitized pain system. So, like, what is a pain system? Our ancestors used pain or the stress system to either fight or run from dangers like sabre-tooth tigers and woolly mammoths. Today, we use the system to respond to the stresses in our lives. Like when someone knocks at our door, when we’re not expecting them, we’re like, oh, my God.
Like somebody here, somebody is actually at my door. Or when someone leaves their signal light on when they’re driving down the highway and they have their signal light on, you’re like, are they turning? Are they not turning? Or when there’s a loud ring tone in a restaurant, you know, when you hear someone’s cell phone, it goes bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. And you’re like, oh,
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:02:06] So you’re in or in a chiropractic office
Bedford Chiropractors Discuss Sensitized Stress System
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:02:09] Or that. Right. Whatever it may be. So when this happens, the body temperature increases, you begin to sweat, your pupils dilate, your breathing rate increases, and then the tension in our muscles also increases. At the same time, we all manifest the stress differently. And it’s the main contributing factor to tension-type headaches. So let’s move to the brain for a second. You can see I’ve got this photo of the brain, there’s the cerebellum, the little brain down there, and then the big brain around it. So there’s a little tiny gland there in the brain. It’s called the hypothalamus. And it activates your sympathetic, which is what makes your energized nervous system by sending three signals to automatic nerves to the adrenaline glands.
Yeah. So the little hypothalamus in your brain releases a signal to the adrenaline glands and it causes the release of adrenaline into your body. And this is what causes you to actually have this fight or flight response. And it causes you to have stress. So can we influence this, can we treat the cause of tension-type headaches? Well, let’s find out. There was a study performed and it was studying the pain threshold, which is your actual ability to handle pressure, tenderness on muscles and your Trappes, whatever it may be.
Sensitized Stress System – Continued
Dr. Ben Boudreau: So there are studying what can the chiropractic adjustment influence this and what they found after pre and post because they did a double-blind study, they found that subjects in the control group, the ones that weren’t receiving any adjustments pre and post, had the same pain as before compared to those who were in an experimental group and who were receiving chiropractic adjustments. And so chiropractic has an influence on the brain’s ability to perceive a pain pressure threshold, which also gives us reason to believe that we’re able to decrease the amount of sensitization that somebody has to pain, which is pretty cool. And that’s the number one cause of tension-type headaches. Pretty amazing.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:04:35] Now, I think that can happen, Ben, like I was reading this before we got life, and so many times a patient will be adjusted and they’ll get off the table and my pain is gone. Right. So what can happen is that you have this rush of Mickan receptors, which basically is a bombardment of movement, signals that make it to the brain. And when you take a look at the tube, let’s say we’re going to simplify things and let’s say there was a tube and you’ve got red balls and green beanballs and green balls are basically the pain signals and the red balls are the movement signals. Well, the more red balls you have, the fewer green balls can fit.
Bedford Chiropractors Discuss – Why Do Headaches Occur in the Head
The more movements we send to the brain, the fewer signals we can have of the pain signals. When you activate the spine, you automatically inversely decrease the amount of pain that the brain can perceive. So that can happen a lot of times instantaneously after an adjustment and in this case, reducing the pain that people are having in the head. Meaning a headache. Right.
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:05:46] By literally adjusting. The head, yeah, the brain, it’s amazing.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:05:53] So we’re good to go here, buddy. Yep. So I just want to give you this a little bit, because we talk about here we have. The site of an attack on an x-ray and you guys are all x-ray specialists, not because we’ve been talking about this for the last four times, but you can see here the disk spaces are fairly wide. And when we come down here. The disk space is almost nothing, and you start to see what’s called bridging bone spurs that are almost connecting the two vertebrates together, and if we had the oblique view, remember what we would see? We would see the hole here that’s being narrowed and the nerve is being compressed.
Why Do Headaches Occur in the Head – Continued
Dr. Clayton Roach: So what happens is on a side you hear when there is no curve in the neck, we start to decrease the amount of space that’s here. Now let’s see what lives there. OK, so when you take a look at the back of the neck, so this is the ear. This is the back of the neck. On the right side, we have these muscles that attach to the back of the skull and some of them go down to one vertebra, some of them go down two vertebrae. Someone and some more, so these muscles aren’t long muscle, so what happens as soon as you have abrupt movement or a lack of proper movement and you have sensitization and you have increased inflammation, these nerves that lurk back here start to become sensitized.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:07:26] So we have one nerve here. If you trace it back, that’s called sub occipital nerve. Now, first of all, before we go any further, I want you guys to show me a thumbs up or heart that you’ve learned something so far because this is very important. How many of you have heard about this condition called sub occipital neuralgia? So all that means is that the sub occipital nerve right here is being irritated, and that’s the one with the all these branches over here. It’s being irritated and it comes in through here, right, and then it goes up the skull and supplies muscles in here, and then we also have another nerve that’s called a greater occipital nerve.
Bedford Chiropractors Discuss Adjustments Fight Headaches
Dr. Clayton Roach: This one right here goes through the muscle here. Sorry, not another muscle. Yeah. The muscle and supplies, the back of the skull and the and the top of the skull. OK, and then we’ve got the lesser occipital nerve and there’s three of them way back here that are going to eventually supply the whole side of the head here, even into the front. So let’s talk about this. When you’ve got some forward head posture because you’re spending time on your phone and whatever that is, you’re compressing this whole area right here. And now all of a sudden, you’ve got a pain in the back of your head that’s compressing nerves that supply the whole side of the head, and now you’ve got a headache that’s caused by neck dysfunction, hence the name server Kogelnik of neck origin headaches.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:09:04] Those are the most common headaches by far. So what we want to do is when we do an adjustment, there is a fast movement that’s applied to the joint, the joint moves, and the muscle also moves very quickly. When that happens, we have what’s called a one B afferent stretch. So to make a long story short is that you have an instant relaxation of the muscles that have just been moved very rapidly. And what happens is over time, you get desensitisation of that part of the brain that Ben was talking about, the hypothalamus.
Adjustments Fight Headaches Continued
Dr. Clayton Roach: That basically means that the amount of pain that you feel starts to go down. And that’s why really when we adjust people, people say, man, you know, my headaches are gone. That is the reason because we’ve had an effect on the brain by moving something locally at a joint B it the C one C to see three areas to basically reduce the amount of tension that’s there and desensitize the nerve and inflammation. So when we take a Tylenol, that’s the craziness of what happens, right? When we take a Tylenol or an Aleve or whatever we’re taking, all we are doing is numbing that area, reducing the inflammation.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:10:28] But guess what? It does nothing to this straight neck, it does nothing I’ve never seen a town move vertebrae before. Have you been? Not yet. Not yet. So it does nothing to the mobility of these vertebrae. It does nothing to stretch these muscles. doesn’t take your phone away, and it doesn’t take your ergonomic non-ergonomic desk from your home and make it better so it fixes nothing. But for a while, the pain goes away. So we think we’re OK because the pain goes away. And we’ve been conditioned to think that if we have no pain and we’re OK, but by no means does that mean that everything has been fixed.
Bedford Chiropractors Discuss Magnesium and Headaches
Dr. Clayton Roach: So what happens? You go through 10 years, 15 years of your life taking medication for headaches and now all of a sudden you start to have pain going down your arm. Why? Well, headaches and arm pain are links other than the fact that your neck is getting worse. And that’s why now you have headaches and now you have arm pain because nobody ever addressed the cause of the problem. And that is my story, and that is what we’ve seen and what I’ve seen for a long time and been seen in the clinic, and that’s the result of people not taking care of the cause of the problem. OK. So you want to touch on
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:11:47] This, Ben? Sure, yeah. So we were starting to do this thing during Humpday where for our our patients and as well as our patients that are abroad to let you guys know about some of the supplements that can help you with some of the issues that you might be facing. And this week, we decided to choose magnesium because magnesium is a great muscle relaxant. It can decrease muscle cramping and tension by relaxing the skeletal and the smooth muscles. Right. Skeletal muscles are these bad boys. Smooth muscles are some of your digestive muscles, and it regulates the nerve function and plays a role in relaxing that nervous system.
Magnesium and Headaches Continued
Dr. Ben Boudreau: So we talked about tension-type headaches, where it’s a very sensitive nervous system, a very sensitive stress system. And so magnesium has the ability to help regulate that and perhaps help you with some of your sleep as well. You can also get natural sources of magnesium like dark chocolate, avocados, almonds, tofu, bananas, et cetera, leafy greens like spinach. However, we offer a great magnesium supplement here in the clinic that is potent and has a high absorption rate. And so if you’re not getting enough of your magnesium through some of the foods that you eat, there are also powdered forms of magnesium that have what’s that? Natural stevia as stevia. And so it actually has a sweetener. And so it’s a pleasant drink for you. Just mix it with water and it’s a nice drink to have. Yeah.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:13:18] So let’s talk a little bit more about that, too, in terms of magnesium, the way you know that you’ve taken too much that you’ll actually get you’re supposed to get the bottle tolerance. So when you take too much, you’ll have a little bit of loose stools. But I find that most of the time people can usually take at least up to five hundred milligrams of magnesium. Now, the powdered sauce is going to be a little more durable. So you can usually get away with taking less, getting more bang for your buck. And also magnesium is used before you go to bed. Not really right before you go to bed, because it can actually have the reverse effect if you’re really depleted.
Magnesium and Headaches Continued
Dr. Clayton Roach: But let’s say two hours, if you take magnesium, it can really, really help you get a good night’s sleep and actually be able to fall asleep. So you want to pick it up in our clinic or wherever else you want to pick it up if you want to do natural sources. Magnesium is a great way to help supplement chiropractic care, to help with the overall state of the muscle and the health of the tissues, because we know that we’re making changes to your structure.
But we also need the supporting cast, the muscles and the ligaments and everything to be healthy as well. And magnesium is great. And if you’re not sleeping and magnesium can help you, then sleeping is a great part of recovery as well. So if you’re going through, you know, hard times and you’re not sleeping, and that’s just a double whammy on top of everything.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:14:39] So, again, you know, we just wanted to present the cause of the issue and explain a very common thing that we see all the time with headaches and how to supplement that with other things as well. So I think this was a great thing to talk about because it is so prevalent and it’s probably the most common. That’s funny. I had an I didn’t tell you this, but I had a guy not too long ago and he started and his whole thing was that when I was talking about headaches, because that was his main complaint, he said, want I get you to know, I said, how many headaches you get?
He says, well, I get the normal, like once a week or and I’m like, what do you mean a normal once a week? Or this is what everybody gets at least a headache a week. I’m like, what do you think is the normal amount of headaches to get? He says, well, once a week I said No. Zero, right.
Bedford Chiropractors Discuss Why You’re Not Supposed to Have Headaches
Dr. Clayton Roach: We were born with a headache. So there’s a reason why the headache is happening. So that was like, you know, it’s like you learn something that he wasn’t supposed to have headaches. And the cause, again, if it’s a service, Kajínek headache is going to come from the neck. So there’s a lot of things that we’re doing now, whether it’s working from home and doing all these things. That can be headache caused, so great topic, what else, Ben?
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:15:54] That’s everything that I have, I mean, I could also talk about we could go on and on with headaches and I always talk about this idea of glass, a glass of water. You know, it’s always the last drop that makes the glass overflow, but there’s always that compounding. so we’re kind of like a little screw at the bottom of that glass and we help decrease the amount of water in there. And I always talk to people. I talk to a patient one day on a first visit. And he said, yeah, I get I get headaches when when I go outside and it’s hot out, I’ll get headaches really quick.
Why You’re Not Supposed to Have Headaches Continued
Dr. Ben Boudreau: Do you know what the cause is? I said, you know, there there is a cause and it’s probably not what you think it is, because when I go outside, I in hot water, I don’t get headaches. And so you have to be able to think back to the glass and think, well, there’s a compounding happening. And the hot weather is just that one thing, that last drop that puts you over the edge. So you have to think back to the source and what it is.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:16:55] And really, when you think about it, like the number one system in our entire body that controls and regulates the function of every single cell is our nervous system and it’s really our bodies. Only way to adapt is through our nervous system. So when you have no curb in your neck, when you have stress at home, when you have stress at work. When you don’t have a great diet, when you’re not exercising. When you have arthritis, all these things are creating stress to the nervous system, which then renders it less able to adapt.
Summarizing What We’ve Learned
Dr. Clayton Roach: So now you’re going through life and you can adapt, so the barometric pressure changes all the time, you get a migraine and you go to shovel, you hurt your back. So all those things happen when the glass is full. And if nobody, as you said, is releasing the valve at the bottom, then you’re always it’s always the straw that breaks the camel’s back. You know, I always joke around people try to catch this guy on their first day when they’re coming in to see me with back pain that, you know.
It was because they tried to put their shoe on and was like, Jesus, you know, how heavy was the shoe? Anyway, they’re convinced it was the shoe. And so that’s a great analogy then. And I think, you know, hopefully, people can appreciate that. So moral of the story is a lot of headaches come from the neck.
Summarizing What We’ve Learned Continued
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:18:16] If you don’t fix the neck and you just treat the headache, you’re not treating the cause. The neck continues to get worse and it goes into the arm and you can get all kinds of different problems. And you eventually you see it on an X-ray or the disk spaces are narrowed and then you got some crap, pardon my language, but you got some crap that you can’t reverse and it’s hard to reverse. You know anything that doesn’t get fixed gets worse. Time doesn’t heal anything. So I hope you guys appreciate it.
This we’re going to talk about next week. We might do a little U-turn next week or see, we’re going to talk it out. Meanwhile, if you guys have any topics that you want us to talk about now that you’ve kind of seen where we’re heading with this, mentioned it in the comments section, it doesn’t have to be elaborate. Just tell us maybe a symptom that you’re experiencing. We can talk about that symptom, whatever it is, somebody that your friends or family members are experiencing. And then we can have a whole Humpday conversation based on you. And guess what? If you’re having that question, probably somebody else is having it as well. All right. So don’t be afraid to comment in the comments section. One thing we’re going to ask you tonight is to share.
Summarizing What We’ve Learned Continued
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:19:28] So here’s what I’m willing to do. Everybody that shares tonight, we’re going to do a draw. We’re going to look at everybody that’s shared tonight. We’re going to do a draw. And whoever we pick is going to win a bottle of Krider. OK, so I’m going to throw a ball of Krider. We have people showing up at the clinic. I don’t even know who they are and they’re buying Krider. So it’s it helps. Right. So people love it. So I’ll share this episode tonight. We’re going to do a draw. We’ll announce the winner next Humpday conversation and you guys can come and pick it up. If you’re local, obviously you can come and pick it up at the clinic.
And Krider basically as an analgesic, it’s got a lot of good stuff in there. So any aching parts, you can’t run over your whole body. If you got to rub it over your whole body, you probably need to come and see us. And so a bottle Krider for everybody that shares, we’re going to pick one person and we’re going to give that away from the value of twenty dollars so we can start with that because we want to get more than a thousand views this time. We got to get a little further. So I love these. Thank you so much. This was fun then. Last thoughts.
Summarizing What We’ve Learned Continued
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:20:35] Thank you guys so much. Thank you for tuning in and all the support that you guys are giving us. It’s definitely helping. A lot of people are seeing it each and every single week. So like and share these posts and give us some love. We’ll put your name in for a bottle. Krider, that stuff is awesome. So thanks for tuning in, guys.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:20:51] Yeah. And Ben is going to share the link for our calendars. So basically if somebody feels propelled to come and see us and if you’re not in the area, doesn’t matter, go see a chiropractor near you. If you’re having some of these conditions, life is too short to be hurting every day. You have to enjoy life and it’s hard to do that when you’re in pain. So I love you and appreciate every one of you. Thank you for tuning in. And we’ll be back next week, Wednesday for Healthy Conversation Number twelve. So we’ve got a dozen done. We love it and hope you love it as well. Talk to you soon. Thank you so much. What’s up?
Conclusion
Dr. Clayton Roach: Listen, if you like this episode, you’ll probably like the other ones, chances are pretty good. So here’s what you need to do. You need to like us and follow us on Facebook. Following means, you get notified when these two guys are alive. Next, family, friends, you need to share these episodes because you never know. You might help them because they need this information as well.
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:21:45] And guys, if you ever miss an episode, make sure you subscribe to us on YouTube. That way, you can watch the episode over and over and over again.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:21:52] Guys, we love you and appreciate you. Take care.
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