Muscle tension is the usual cause of tension headache.  It may be caused by stress, bad posture, anxiety, heat and exhaustion.  When a person experiences extreme emotions such as anger or fear, muscles in the neck and back contract or become tense causing headaches.  Tens of millions of Americans daily experience headaches.  Headaches can disrupt one’s daily activities and reduce productivity Chiropractors have been treating headaches of all types for years and many Americans for their headache problems seek chiropractic treatment as recourse.

Chiropractors treat both migraine and tension headache.  Tension headaches, also called muscle contraction headaches are the most common headaches and are the most complained type of headache to the chiropractor.  Tension headaches usually are felt on both sides of the head and they feel like nagging, aching pain.  Migraines are much severe in pain intensity with a sense of throbbing felt inside the head.  Headaches are caused by neuromuscular factors and adjusting this system can relieve the headache.  The adjustment is done on the nerves and joints that are located in the shoulders and neck.

Migraine sufferers manifest muscle pain, spasms, or neck problems, which can be the cause of their migraine.  Experienced chiropractors often locate and treat well the source of the migraine.  Of course, there is always pharmaceutical drugs to relieve the headache but the most reliable way to take away this pain and correct the body at the same time is through chiropractic therapy.  The chiropractor helps relieve the headache by loosening, stretching or relaxing the contracted muscles and joints.  Massage can also be applied to the neck and back areas, which a chiropractor ably can do especially for patients suffering frequent headaches.

Experienced chiropractors usually are able to treat the pain completely after a few visits.  However, depending on the severity of the problem, some treatments may take weeks to finish. People react differently with chiropractic therapy.  Some are very responsive of the treatment while others may take a while for their problems to be resolved with chiropractic care.  Patients with persisting headaches are usually given diagnostic examinations such as x-rays to closely study whether aberrations in the neck, vertebrae or shoulders are the cause of the headache.  There are also headaches that are beyond the power of chiropractic therapy to cure and these cases are referred to specialists such as surgeons.

Chiropractic therapy does not rely on pharmaceutical analgesics, which causes a term called rebound headache or analgesic headache.  A rebound headache is caused by the body’s habit of too much medication intake causing the body to adapt to the medicine.

Medications merely act as palliatives for pain, never addressing the source of the problem.  Chiropractic therapy does not entail any use of medications, hence there is no possibility of analgesic rebound headaches to occur and, more importantly, it addresses and treats the source of the problem itself.

Zuobiao (Roy) Yuan is a licensed acupuncturist and doctor of chinese medicine of in Edina, MN.