So you have a headache....Your eyes hurt, your forehead is pounding, your neck is sore and tight, your scalp feels as if it is being slowly removed, lights bother you, noise sets your teeth on edge, and then there are your children, the house, dinner, your husband/wife and the daily demands of life. You would like to stop the world and get off!
Thousands of children and adults are afflicted with this headache "thing". As a matter of fact, headaches are the most common reason people seek chiropractic care. Headaches have been sold to the public as a problem which needs to be "treated", as a disease, or some sort of condition. We have gingerly been taught to believe that headaches need to be remedied. Millions of dollars of advertising are spent annually on the benefits of drugs for the treatment of headaches. And we have bought into this carefully contrived thinking. So let’s look at this "headache thing" from a different perspective.
The word "Headache" simply means - ache in the head. It is NOT a disease. It is simply an ache. A pain. A symptom. I am not even remotely making light of it though - this symptom can be severe and debilitating. It is said that there are different types of headaches; migraines, cluster, tension, occipital, sinus, etc. All of them seem to have a different pattern, location, severity, and, of course drug, to deal with it.
There seems to be no weight given to the idea that there might be a reason why a person might be experiencing headaches - no weight as to the "WHY".
Let’s look at this closer.
I mentioned that a headache is a symptom. It is simply your body literally "talking" back to you. We need to be able to interpret that language. Most people I meet are so busy treating their pain, they forget that it has a reason for being. A headache is a sign your body produces to let you know that it is having a difficult time handling something. The vast majority of headaches are found at the base of the head or in the region of the temples or over the eyes.
As a profession we have found that the vast majority of headaches are simply signs of a vertebral subluxation - a distortion of some of the vertebrae of the neck area mostly affecting the function of the nervous system. You would be surprised to learn that most of all subluxations I see in adults and children, can be traced to a difficult delivery. We call this Traumatic Birth Syndrome. Even an average, uncomplicated delivery can be traumatic for a child and can produce vertebral subluxations.
These subluxations affect the manner in which the nervous system transmits information and can be very catastrophic. When this occurs, certain neck muscles are called into play to protect the nervous system from damage and you experience a "tension" headache. Very often, pain is transmitted to the face and people have been trained to think it is their sinuses at fault. They reach for sinus medication and the profit cascade begins. And then there is the temple, pounding pain - a migraine; again different drugs. And the headaches which come in clusters - cluster headaches; more drugs.
I am describing the vast majority of headaches. There are others, however, that are not caused by subluxations. These can be caused by diet and poor nutrition - hypoglycemia, for instance. I see many of these in my practice. Some are caused by an aneurysm, a disease process, toxicity, a tumor, etc. The point I am making is that no headaches should be taken lightly - it is always a sign that something is not OK.
If you or your child is experiencing headaches, it would take a case history, comprehensive examination and possibly x-rays to determine the reason for your headaches.
