Chronic headaches are different from the sort that affect most everyone from time to time. Instead of an occasional unwanted visitor, chronic headaches occur frequently and recur often.
Using over-the-counter pain medications for the occasional headache is fine. You’re not using these drugs long enough to risk overloading internal organs like the stomach, liver, and kidneys.
However, when headaches are chronic, they can strike as often as daily, and then the medication load can become a bigger problem than your head pain. At Active Care Chiropractic & Rehabilitation in Lafayette Hill, the Main Line, East Falls, Elkins Park, Manayunk and Hatfield, Pennsylvania, we recommend chiropractic adjustments as a holistic, drug-free way to help deal with the burden of chronic headaches.
There are over 100 types of headaches but there’s no single type that causes chronic headaches. Most commonly though, chronic headaches connect with four dominant types:
For a diagnosis of chronic headache, you’ll have headaches for 15 or more days a month, for a period lasting longer than three consecutive months. These can be short or long duration headaches, under or over four hours long.
The principle behind chiropractic treatment isn’t focused on direct healing, but rather to help bring your body back into balance so that it can heal itself. We do this by correcting relationships between joints, muscles, nerves, and elements of your spine and skeletal system.
Chiropractic adjustments improve blood flow, correct postural problems, and release trapped nerves, all conditions that can contribute to primary headaches, those that are their own condition and not related to other illness or disease.
Adjusting the spine improves mobility in your neck, reducing joint irritations between cervical vertebrae, which can help ease cervicogenic headaches, those that originate in the neck. We also offer various soft tissue manipulations to ease muscle tension in the neck, shoulders, and upper back.
Though instant relief isn’t part of chiropractic by design, many patients find fast relief after adjustments. Beyond this effect, you can expect a reduction in headache frequency, and those you do have may be less intense.
Your neck moves more easily with reduced stiffness. You’ll be more aware of your body posture and, perhaps best of all, your need for pain medication should be a fraction of what it was before treatment.
Visit the headache and migraine specialists at Active Care Chiropractic & Rehabilitation for a consultation on your personalized headache management plan. Call or click to book with our nearest office today.
