Neck Pain Treatments Combining Cold Laser & Physical Therapy
Neck Pain
Your cervical spine begins at the bottom of your skull and extends down to your shoulders. It is composed of seven small vertebrae. The joints and muscles of your neck are responsible for bearing the entire weight of your head, and facilitating its movement. As a result of poor posture, extra wear and tear on its muscles, bones, joints, and tendons can lead to neck pain and inflammation.
Slouching and Its Effect on the Neck and Back
Slouching, quite basically, is sitting or standing with your head and shoulders drooping forward. When you slouch, not only does your neck stick out forward, but your shoulder blades destabilize, and your middle back curves in the wrong direction.
Prolonged slouching has been found to be the most common cause of neck and back pain. When you have good posture, the weight of your head is directly above your shoulders. But every inch your head moves forward increases the strain on your muscles and tendons. Thus, poor posture can often lead to tension headaches, migraine headaches, tendonitis, shoulder pain, jaw pain, and disc injuries.
How Do You Get Neck Pain and Back Pain from Slouching?
When your neck protrudes forward, your head does likewise, away from your center of gravity. This causes the entire weight of the head to be placed on the wrong areas. Sitting like this for long periods of time overwhelms these joints and muscles, leading to injury and pain.
Over time, the shoulder blades that anchor the neck destabilize, stretching and tightening the wrong back muscles, and causing the middle back to curve outward. In turn, this forward stretch causes the back muscles, or back extensors, to weaken.
Thus, prolonged slouching weakens and damages your muscles and joints, leading to chronic neck and back pain. Increasing joint and muscle strain also often increases the chances of developing further neck pain from sleeping wrong, or from conducting normal exercises and movements.
Prevention of Neck and Back Pain from Slouching
Whether you are a habitual sloucher or your posture has recently started deteriorating, relief can be obtained by:
- Correcting your posture
- Relaxing your shoulders and back muscles
- Strengthening your back muscles and joints
- Aligning your spine
- Chiropractic and physical therapy treatments
Conservative Treatments
Therapeutic treatments for addressing soft tissue injuries involve massage therapy, manual therapy, trigger point therapy, Graston Technique, or Active Release Technique. These treatments increase blood flow, decrease muscle spasms, enhance flexibility, speed healing, and promote proper tissue repair.
When these treatments are incorporated into a treatment plan patients heal faster and are less likely to have long-term pain or soft tissue fibrosis or scar tissue in the injured muscle. These soft tissue treatments are incorporated with therapeutic exercise and flexibility programs.
Treatment for headache symptoms may involve many prescription, over the counter, herbal, and homeopathic remedies. The neck muscles need to function appropriately and not remain in spasms, which alters neck spinal movements and postures. For those with arthritic degeneration in the cervical spine, restoring proper muscle function is even more important. This often requires people to change their postures, habits, and activities. Acupuncture has been known to help headache sufferers.
Working any muscles in the front of the neck is not comfortable, but it needs to be done to restore proper cervical and shoulder function. The neck, shoulder, scapula, and arm work as a functional unit to turn your head, raise your shoulder, or reach in front of you. Dysfunction in any of these muscles leads to pain and tendinopathy.
Medical Treatments
NSAIDs are often prescribed for the initial acute injury stages. In severe cases that involve multiple joint regions, muscle relaxers or oral steroids can be given. Trigger point injections, botox, or steroid injections can be treatment options. Pain management is not usually required unless stronger medications or joint injections are required for treatment.
MRI and X-rays will not usually be ordered to evaluate mild to moderate muscle, tendon, and ligament injuries. Severe cases may utilize advanced imaging to rule out bone fractures, edema, nerve entrapments, tendon or muscle ruptures. NCV testing may be utilized in cases that also involve muscle, sensory, or reflex loss.
Cervical spinal disc bulges and herniations onto the spinal cord or nerve root produce different symptoms and location of symptoms. Your chiropractor, physical therapist, occupational therapist, or physician will evaluate your condition and make a proper diagnosis and treatment recommendations. Ask them any questions you might have about your injury and treatment progression for your neck.
Chiropractic Adjustive Techniques
Chiropractic adjustments attempt to increase the movement of the joint complex. With injury, poor posture, sprains, and strains, muscles tighten up and the joints can become locked up. This lack of movement is felt when you look over your shoulder and feel a pulling, dull pain, or a twinge of pain. Mildly stuck joints can be loosened up in the day with stretching and range of motion exercises. Moderately stuck joints often need a little help to restore their normal motion with chiropractic adjustments. Severely stuck joints cause sharp and severe pain whenever they put pressure upon the joint or try and move the joint complex.
Joint complex injuries are common whenever a patient says they have pain when sitting or standing too long, or the pain always "starts right here." Pressing on an injured joint causes pain, and people noticed reduced range of motion looking over their shoulder.
Healthy joints do not experience pain with orthopedic testing. A healthy joint comfortably moves when light pressure is applied to the spinous process, rocking the joint back-and-forth. A mildly stuck joint feels a little stiff and a little sore to the patient. Whereas moderate and severe joint sprains cause immediate pain when pressure is applied.
There are multiple ways to get a joint moving again. The most important part is that the joint is moving in its proper range of motion and without pain. Many people think chiropractors only perform manual manipulation. Most likely their first experience with a chiropractic was years ago, and manual manipulation was the most common form of treatment. Over time and with technology, treatments have changed with the same goal of getting neck joints moving.
There are several very gentle ways to adjust an injured neck joint, including Activator Technique and Thompson Drop Technique. Activator utilizes a spring load instrument "bump" the joint and increase joint motion before the muscles tighten up. Thompson Drop Technique utilizes specific tables that drop two inches to increase the motion without turning or rotating the neck. Learn more about types of chiropractic adjustments.
In Conclusion
The neck and upper extremity works as a comprehensive unit performing many of the repetitive tasks at home, work, and recreational sports. Injuries to one area of the musculature often indicate that additional damage has been incurred by other muscles.
Many therapeutic exercises can help restore proper strength and endurance to the neck, shoulder, upper back, and arm muscles. Isometric exercises are often the initial treatment exercises. Followed by single plane rubber band exercises for elbow flexion, extension, lateral flexion, abduction, and adduction movements. Dynamic exercises involving stability ball push-ups can be performed on the wall or floor. The more unstable of the surface the more effort and stabilization is required of all the upper extremity muscles.
Push-ups on a stability ball enhances neuromuscular learning throughout the neck, scapula, shoulder, upper arm, and lower our muscles. Additional strength exercises can be found on the arm and shoulder strengthening pages.
Our Chandler Chiropractic & Physical Therapy clinic treats patients with a variety of muscle, tendon, joint, and ligament injuries. The clinic provides treatment for runners, tri-athletes, and weekend warriors in addition to common headache, neck, and back patients traditionally seen in Chiropractic, Physical Therapy, Massage Therapy clinics. We work with all ages and abilities of the residents in Phoenix, Tempe, Gilbert, Mesa, and Chandler AZ.