Instant Relief

Chapter 1 Your Head If you are one of the millions of Americans prone to being sidelined by crippling headaches, it's time for a change. Although most people think that headaches are a normal and inevitable result of stress, headaches need not be the norm for you. I have a number of quick treatment options that have made most of my patients' stress-related headaches disappear fast--and they can do the same for you. Using the simple techniques in this book, you will be able to take control and relieve headaches once you feel their symptoms coming on. There's no need to wait thirty minutes for an over-the-counter medication to kick in when you can get Instant Relief without any medication at all. My techniques work because they are based on an understanding of the way stress affects the muscles that support the head, causing mechanical headaches. When you're under stress, you tend to tighten the muscles in the neck, skull, and face. These tight muscles can cause both vascular compression and nerve compression. Vascular compression means that blood vessels are being squeezed and can't deliver adequate oxygen to cells. Nerve compression results in less-than-optimum electrical-impulse delivery to muscles and inhibits muscular function. Emotional stress, however, is not the only reason for mechanical headaches. The tight muscles that lead to so-called "mechanical headaches" also occur when you spend too long a time in a posture that forces your head out of what we call its neutral position. In the neutral position the head sits directly atop the neck in an alignment of relaxed verticality, which follows the gentle S shape of the entire spine with its curves at the neck, upper back, and lower back. If it remains in this position, the head will be well supported by all the vertebrae immediately below it--the vertebrae of the neck (the cervical spine) and the upper back (the thoracic spine), as well as the lumbar and sacral vertebrae--and also by the muscles and ligaments that connect to these vertebrae. The head needs all the support it can get, because it weighs between ten and twelve pounds--the weight of a bowling ball. Unfortunately, your head is likely to spend much of its time without adequate support, because you put it into postures that take it out of neutral. If you spend a lot of time on the phone, for example, with your head tilted to hold the phone between your ear and your shoulder ("phone hugging"), you're forcing your head out of neutral position. If you spend a lot of time with your head in a protruded position, with the ears far forward of the shoulders--a position assumed by millions of people every day as they stare at their computer screens or bend over their paperwork--the head doesn't get the support it needs. Any posture that takes your head out of neutral position for an extended period of time has the potential to cause a headache because of the muscle tightening that results, and the vascular and nerve compression that result from muscle tightening. There's another kind of nerve compression that can also result in a headache. Several of the twelve cranial nerves, which originate in the brain and are responsible for many functions, including the special senses of sight, hearing, smelling, and taste, pass through small openings at the base of the skull. If those nerves get compressed because of deviations in the head's normal position, they too can cause headaches. Relieving your headache, however, may not be as simple as returning your head to its neutral position. If the head has remained in a protruded position for an extended period of time, bringing it back to neutral can stretch tight tissues, which leads to that common achiness in the back of the head, or above the ear or the eye on one side of the head. Even the scalp can become tense and cause discomfort. That's why I've provided a Brill exercise called a Scalp Glide (EBrill, Peggy W. is the author of 'Instant Relief', published 2007 under ISBN 9780553585476 and ISBN 0553585479.