Neck Pain Chiropractor In Palm Bay, FL
So, Dr. Dan, here with Restoration Health Chiropractic, and today we’re talking about what’s causing your neck pain.
Finding the Cause of Your Neck Pain
So we’ve got some neck pain. The good question is tissue wise, what’s causing the neck pain, where’s the neck pain coming from? So you’ve got the joints in the neck, you’ve got the muscles in the neck, you’ve got the soft tissue, the discs, the ligaments, what can be causing that pain. Interestingly enough, most of the time, people are told it’s a herniation, it’s a bulge, just some kind of soft tissue disc type injury. Reality is less than 10% of all spine pain, not just neck or spine pain less than 10% has to do with a disc that is bulging out hitting a nerve root, even if it’s there, that’s generally not the cause of the pain. They did a study back and then try to figure out what is causing a penny specific to the neck. The number one tissue source of pain in the neck is what’s called the facet joint capsule.
The Facet Joint Capsule and Neck Pain
So if this is the joints in the spine and this is the front, there’s the disc, these are the joint themselves. Where the joints we’ve got like a knuckle would be. These have a capsule around them. The capsule is like a dense ligament, a cartilage capsule around it. So when they get stretched, irritated, pulled, that’s the number one tissue source of pain in the neck. So how can we influence that facet joint capsule. The facetted joint capsules are the fulcrum for balancing the fulcrum is weight distribution. So if you remember back in like elementary school, the seesaw the teeter totter, there’s like the plank, and then there’s the stick and it sits on top of it like that. That’s the fulcrum. So if you have a 20 pound kid, and a 20 pound kid, on the foot, we have 40 pounds of pressure. The fulcrum in your neck are these joint capsules, those joints themselves and the capsules around. So what we look for, if that head is going forward like this, the weight of the head instead of being here is now all forward. If you carry a bowling ball forward like this, it gets heavy, you average heads about 14 pounds. So in gravity if you’re distorted postural your head is tilted to the side, your head has moved forward, which is commonly what we’ll see what you’re doing is you’re putting more strain on the fulcrum, those joint capsules and that’s what’s causing your your pain the majority of the time. So while we’re looking at the joints in your spine, what we’re trying to figure out what’s going on, we are definitely going to address those postural distortions. If we can get that head better balanced. Take some of the load off those joints, your pain is going to get better. That’s how we can fix you.