Hi, I’m Dr. Steven Battaglino with Battaglino Family Chiropractic. I’d like to talk about chiropractic and headaches.
Headaches are a very common symptom that patients exhibit that they often refer to as normal. “Well, I normally get headaches once or twice a week” or sometimes they’re daily. And this becomes their new normal where they’re used to having some level of headache all the time and they just attribute it to stress. the stress of life or you know like staring at a screen too long.
But let’s be honest, headaches are not normal. We’re not supposed to have pain in our head all the time. And a lot of times what happens is that there is pressure in the neck or further down in the spine that’s causing that headache.
So, let’s look a little bit at the anatomy and we’ll get a better idea about what might be causing the headache and why chiropractic is such an excellent choice for getting rid of headaches. This is the side view. So, the head would be on top of here. This is the base of the skull and we see that there are bones. Vertebra in the spine. We also see that there are discs, little shock absorbers and nerves that exit. So, if you think about all of the fine motor skills that your fingers have and touch, you have great sensation and the strength. It takes a lot of wire to power your arms and hands. So, all of those nerves come out of the neck. There’s a lot of nerve flow coming out of here and there’s a lot of nerve so that goes back up into the head, the skull and scalp and so forth.
So, when things get out of place, they typically do so with the bone going backwards. And what that does, I’ll show you here on this little exhibit here. What happens when the bone goes backwards it kind of sheers the disk and puts pressure on it. It kind of pulls it backwards. The disc will swell up and the body really clamps down to try and protect that area because it knows that it’s, you know, injured. And so, when it swells or when it’s clamped down and not moving properly there’s pressure on these nerve that exit right behind the disc. And so, they become vulnerable. Those nerves go in part back up into their head or of various other places. Keep in mind, these nerves that exit the spine are carrying nerve fibers that have pain. But only about 10% of those fibers are pain nerves. The other 90 percent are going to run a nerve flow that controls organs, reflexes and a lot of different functions and systems in our body.
So, we have an area that’s out of place. What are our options? If there’s pressure on this nerve because a swelling from the disc. Well, we could take over-the-counter NSAIDS, anti-inflammatory drugs like Ibuprofen, Motrin, Aleve. These will help just globally throughout your body chemically lower the amount of inflammation in your body and you’ll have some relief. In my viewpoint, that’s just like taking the batteries out of your smoke alarm when it’s going off in your kitchen. Let’s say there’s something burning in the oven. If you just take the batteries out of the smoke alarm, have you fix that problem? Not really.
So, what I propose is that we fix the problem by restoring proper alignment in the spine again by taking that bone and where it’s stretching and squeezing that disc, kind of put it back where it’s supposed to be so that the swelling can go down. So that the muscles can start to relax and so the pressure on those nerves goes away.
So, one of the first things that happens is the pain goes away, which is fantastic. That’s basically what patients come in for. They have some sort of pain and they want to get rid of it. But the really good side effect of that is that by releasing pressure on those nerves you’re also allowing that nerve to do its job. And that job is typically to run various organs and systems in that area. Keep in mind you know our our digestive system, cardiovascular system, reproductive system all the systems of the body are run by nerves that exit through here. We want to maximize the body’s ability to do that. And taking pressure off so that we get rid of headaches is just kind of the tip of the iceberg.
I’m Dr. Steve Battaglino with Battaglino Family Chiropractic and this has been your health minute.