What is it?
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?
Although many believe that recurrent headaches are a chronic condition that cannot be cured, this is only a myth. 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 and to people between 20 and 50 years old.
Due to their intense symptoms, headaches can also cause difficulties with attention, with concentration and an elevated sense of fatigue. This in turn often tends to diminish your performance at work and in your recreational activities, as well as significantly decreasing quality of life and general satisfaction with multiple facets of life.
What does it look like?
A headache can present itself in multiple ways: 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 to your needs.
How can physiotherapy help?
Due to the large range of headache subtypes, identifying the cause can be quite challenging. For example, cervicogenic cephalalgias are caused by a dysfunction in the cervical spine, while tension cephalalgias arise from muscles tensions in the neck region. For this reason, a personalized approach in physical therapy becomes crucial to optimize patient care.
A certified Physical Therapist will then make an assessment and 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.
