Yes, the neck can absolutely contribute to your headache or migraine! It can also refer pain down to your upper back, shoulders and that pesky spot between your shoulders blades that just won’t go away no matter how much you poke around.
The upper part of your neck feeds directly into your headache centre. The headache centre is the meeting point for pretty much all the nerves responsible for the symptoms of headache and migraine. Some of these nerves are the stomach (vagus), back of head (greater occipital) and face, cheek, jaw (facial) nerves. The information that comes into the headache centre then gets misinterpreted by the cortex (big fleshy part of the brain) as dangerous and then creates pain and other symptoms from where the cortex thinks the issue is coming from like nausea or pain behind the eye.
The underlying problem in the vast majority of headache or migraine disorders, that can not be attributed to a specific cause, is a sensitised headache centre (lower brainstem).This physiological disorder is also not something that will be picked up on imaging.
Here at Wisdom Physiotherapy we use a cutting edge approach to assess and treat this headache centre using only our hands. The neck is our pathway to the headache centre and we then proceed to change the sensitivity. This approach can be make a significant change most people we see and identify the neck as playing a role is your headache or migraine.
To make an appointment with one of our headache and neck physiotherapists in Claremont, click here to book online or call (08) 9384 1555
