We at Van Every Family Chiropractic Center of Royal Oak, Michigan, care about your health and well-being and strive to provide you with current information in a variety of health topics!
What Puts the 'Ache' in Headache?
The ache in headache does not come from your brain—your brain cannot feel pain. During brain surgery a patient is often wide awake feeling nothing, even talking to the surgeons and nurses while his/her brain is being operated on (a local anesthetic numbs the scalp). So what puts the "ache" in headache? It's the non-brain structures: blood vessels, membranes and cranial nerves in the brain and skull. When these structures are stretched, compressed, irritated, inflamed or infected headaches often result.
The Chiropractic Approach
Why have millions of headache sufferers turned to the natural, drug-free chiropractic approach to health? (1)
That's because chiropractic has a unique healing approach—chiropractors are the only health professionals trained to analyze your body for a serious and often ignored condition that can damage your nerves, inflame your tissues, cause muscles to tighten and knot, weaken your body, cause fatigue and set the stage for sickness and disease. This condition is called the subluxation.
Just as you may have a cavity in your tooth and be unaware of the damage it's causing, so a subluxation may be causing serious harm to your body—sometimes for years—without your knowledge.
The Chiropractic Checkup
If you have a subluxation we will give you a safe, gentle adjustment to correct the subluxation, thus removing nerve pressure and structural distortions.
Why Does Chiropractic Work So Well?
One study of 6,000 long-term headache sufferers (two to 25 years) revealed that neck injury (whiplash, falls) was the most important factor in the cause of the headache and should be suspected in every nonspecific case of headache. (2)
Subluxation correction has powerful effects. In a randomized controlled trial performed at the University of Odense, Denmark, those under chiropractic care decreased their use of painkillers by 36% and the number of headache hours per day decreased by 69%. (3)
Headaches affect children too. For example, a 10-year-old girl with chronic, severe migraine (6 times a week for the past 3 years) was unable to go to school due to the severity of her condition. Neurologists could not help her. A chiropractic examination revealed a subluxation in her upper neck. After her third adjustment she was off her pain medications and by the third week she was back in school, had started dance classes for the first time in 2 years, "and actually began to smile again. She was leading a normal and healthy life for a child her age by the end of the 5th visit." (4)
Not A Headache Therapy
For over a hundred years headache and migraine sufferers have turned to chiropractic for help, and yet chiropractic is not a headache therapy or treatment. Chiropractic's role is not to treat any specific disease, but to care for the person who has the condition by ensuring that their entire body functions better by correcting their subluxations.
Anyone suffering from headaches (and any other condition) should make sure the nervous system and structural system is free from subluxations—for the health of their whole body, not just certain parts.
References:
1. Eisenberg DM. Unconventional medicine in the United States. NEJM. 1993;328:246-252.
2. Braaf MM, Rosner SJ. Trauma of the cervical spine as cause of chronic headache. Trauma. 1975;15:441-446.
3. Nilsson N, Christensen HW, Hartvigsen J. The effect of spinal manipulation in the treatment of cervicogenic headache. JMPT. 1997;20:326-330.
4. Bofshever H. Encephalgia/migraine. ICPA Newsletter. Jan/Feb 2000.
