Chiropractic therapy and specific exercises for the neck muscles have been shown to be one of the most effective treatment methods to help patients suffering from neck pain. For more than 100 years, chiropractic care has been helping patients with neck discomfort. This article will discuss how chiropractic care and the specific exercises a chiropractor gives a patient can help with neck discomfort.
Most people know that chiropractors help people with neck discomfort by finding and correcting misalignments and incorrectly moving joints in the neck bones called the cervical vertebrae. This helps relieve pain that may have started suddenly from an accident or may have built up from minor irritations and poor head and neck posture.
In addition to using “spinal adjustments” to correct physical abnormalities of the cervical spine, doctors of chiropractic also train patients to perform strengthening and stretching exercises that improve results. These exercises speed healing and pain relief and help, in the long term, to improve upper body posture to prevent painful conditions from recurring.
These exercises are simple and easy to perform and take very little time. No exercise equipment needed. The patient is educated to perform the exercises on his own. In most cases, the muscles in the front of the neck and chest are excessively tight. This causes the head and shoulders to lean forward. The muscles at the back of the neck and between the shoulder blades are often weak and cannot pull the head and shoulders back enough.
The human head weighs approximately 10 to 14 pounds, which is equivalent to the weight of a bowling ball. If the head and upper body are directly over the chest and lower body, we can consider this to be a proper posture. However, if the head is even two or three inches forward, the muscles and joints of the spine have to support the equivalent of two or three bowling balls. It’s no wonder many people who have to sit at desk jobs for long periods of time even get neck pain, upper back pain, and tension headaches. When we consider that children begin to sit for long hours when they go to day care on the weekends and maintain long periods of sitting posture well into adulthood, it is not surprising that we have reached almost epidemic problems due to poor ergonomics.
By using chiropractic care methods and specific neck stretching and strengthening exercises, the vast majority of patients are able to avoid taking pain relievers and invasive surgeries and obtain relief from neck pain.
