Not all headaches are the same.
Headaches, including migraines, have a big impact on the quality of your life, especially if they happen often. They can keep you from being productive or enjoying life. Instead, they make you less than your best and can even put you into bed for hours or a full day.
It’s hard to concentrate and take care of everyday things if you have a headache. And a migraine makes it even worse when you have difficult symptoms like sensitivity to light and sound.
Not all headaches are the same. You could experience different types of headaches, which can have a variety of causes and triggers. In many cases, lifestyle changes and chiropractic care can address causes of headaches to minimize or prevent them.
Types of Headaches
Primary headaches are ones that aren’t connected to an underlying health condition or disease. Primary headaches can have many triggers and causes that can bring them on. These depend on the person, the type of headache and other factors. There are many types of primary headaches, including:
Tension headaches
Migraines
Cluster headaches
Tension Headaches
Tension headaches are usually mild to moderate in intensity, and they feel like tightness pressing on the head. You could have sporadic tension headaches that happen once in a while or chronic tension headaches that consistently come back. Stress, sore neck or back muscles, and anxiety tend to trigger this type of headache. Other things that can trigger tension headaches are alcohol or caffeine use or withdrawal, fatigue, dental problems like jaw clenching or teeth grinding, eye strain or overexertion. Tension headaches can come with symptoms like:
A dull ache in the head
Pressure on the front, sides and/or back of the head
Sensitive muscles on the shoulders, neck and scalp
Migraines
Migraines come with a more intense level of pain than other headaches. Migraines can be triggered by many factors that include diet, weather, sleep, medications, hormonal changes, stress and others. Migraine symptoms may include:
Throbbing, pulsing pain on one or both sides of the head
Nausea and vomiting
Sensitivity to light, sound, smell and/or touch
Migraines may or may not have something called an aura happen before the migraine symptoms or during them. Migraine aura usually affects your eyes, so you might see light flashes or brightness. But it could include trouble speaking, hearing noises, feeling pins and needles in extremities and other sensations.
Cluster Headaches
While rare, cluster headaches are one of the main types of headaches. They include severe pain that happens in clusters or cycles, with a cluster period going on for weeks to months, or even a year or more, at a time. Then, a person can go long periods of time without a headache.
There are two types:
Episodic Cluster Headaches: These have attacks that can go on for seven days up to an entire year when they’re not treated. Usually it lasts for two weeks up to three months. These are cluster periods, and then you can go for periods of three months or more without pain in between the cluster periods.
Chronic Cluster Headaches: These have attacks that go on for a year or even longer. They either don’t have remission, which is a time with the relief of pain, or they have short times of remission of three months or less.
During the cluster periods, you could have symptoms like:
Severe pain
Pain on one side of the head
Pain in the eye area on one side
When to See a Chiropractor for Headaches
In some cases, a headache can be a serious sign that you need medical attention. You should visit a medical professional for headaches if they’re sudden and severe, they come on after you hit your head or you have other serious symptoms along with the headache. These symptoms could be fever, eye or ear pain, confusion, a stiff neck or loss of consciousness. Another reason to seek medical attention for headaches is if they are frequent and are not impacted by over-the-counter treatments and lifestyle changes.
An occasional headache is common and will usually go away after rest and some medication. You may want to visit a chiropractor if you notice them happening more often, once a week or so. Or if you have headaches that cause you to see an aura or become sensitive to light. A chiropractor can identify and address many of the causes of headaches and provide treatments to help both tension headaches and migraines.
How Does a Chiropractor Help Relieve Headaches?
Chiropractors understand how tension and misalignment in the body can cause other areas of your body to become tense, resulting in headaches.
Some of the main chiropractic treatments for headaches available at Village include:
Adjustments: Spinal adjustments, or spinal manipulation, put your spine and joints into the proper position to relieve tension and help improve blood circulation. Better blood flow can definitely help you to feel better. A regular schedule of adjustments can also help some patients avoid future headaches.
Massage: Massage therapy can ease stress and tension in muscles to relieve and prevent headaches.
Lifestyle changes: Chiropractors, like Dr. Thomas, can offer advice on lifestyle changes like exercises, nutrition changes, relaxation and posture that could help with causes of headaches.
Your chiropractor can give you advice on ways you can reduce headaches from home to support the benefits your chiropractic visits provide. Pay attention to possible triggers of your headaches. For example, do you get headaches after drinking a lot of coffee or trying to cut back on caffeine? If so, try to reduce the caffeine gradually and replace some of your caffeinated beverages with more water. Also, pay attention to your posture and whether you have tight muscles and stress before headaches. In this case, you can do exercises to improve your posture and stretch your muscles. You could also do things that help you reduce stress, such as deep breathing and improving your time management.
To learn more about chiropractic treatments for headaches, download your copy of our helpful ebook, “How Chiropractic Care Can Help Relieve Headaches”. Also, make an appointment for a customized consultation with our chiropractor.
