Headaches, also known as cephalalgias, are one of the most common medical conditions encountered in the general population. After all, who has never experiences one or had a friend or family member complain about one?
It is a myth that recurrent headaches are a chronic condition that cannot be cured. Indeed, some types of headaches can be vastly diminished in either frequency or intensity, and even completely remediated through physical therapy.
Who could be affected?
This condition, which is very diverse in causes and subtypes, can impact people of all ages and genders, regardless of their physical fitness, dietary habits and of their general health status. However, according to statistics, headaches occur more frequently to women between 20 and 50 years old.
Due to their intense symptoms, headaches can also cause difficulties with attention, concentration and increased fatigue. This often tends to diminish work performance and decrease participation in leisure activities and socialization. These factors can significantly decrease quality of life, both physically and psychologically.
What do headaches look like?
Every individual headache can present differently: it could be a single continuous dull ache or many small sudden jolts of pain, a single episode of occurrence per week or tens of times a day, forehead or back-of-the-head pain that seems to descend into your neck, etc. The single common element to all types of headaches is a pain in the general area of the head, often felt as if it was coming from inside the head itself.
Some subtypes of headaches can also present themselves accompanied by neck or shoulder pain. It is therefore quite crucial to properly detail the symptoms you experience when consulting a healthcare professional to facilitate an accurate diagnosis and an optimized course of treatment tailored to your needs.
How can physiotherapy help with headaches?
Due to the large range of headache subtypes, identifying the cause can be quite challenging. For example, cervicogenic cephalalgias (coming from the neck) are caused by a issue in the upper cervical spine joints, while tension cephalalgias arise from muscles tensions in the head and neck region. For this reason, a personalized approach in physical therapy becomes crucial to optimize patient care.
If a headache is of cervical origin, a physical therapist offer a wide range of treatment modalities such as specific neuromotor control exercises of the neck, targeted cervical spine mobilization techniques, and practical ergonomic posture guidelines.
While many types of headaches can be treated in physical therapy, some can be a sign of an underlying health issue, especially if the headaches themselves are very frequent, severe, continuous or have appeared suddenly. It is therefore important to take this condition seriously and to take the necessary steps to exclude the possibility of any unknown ailment and to enable an enthusiastic return to your daily activities.
