Can Chiropractors Help Treat Headaches?

We chiropractors know that our style of healthcare helps headaches. The public, however, has little clue that chiropractors all over the world are extremely effective at reducing the intensity, severity, and frequency of various headaches for patients. So how do we educate the public and our patients about how chiropractic can help headaches?

Now, let’s be very clear: for conditions that patients seek chiropractic care, it’s important to mention that we don’t treat “headaches” per se. We treat the vertebrae, joints, and muscles, and restore structural alignment. This in turn helps the nervous and circulatory systems to improve and the secondary responses include helping relieve pain in a variety of body regions, including the head.

Headaches affect the quality of life for millions of people around the world

Recall that many different types of headaches exist. Tension, migraine, cluster, and sinus are some of the major ones, each with their own characteristics, and the list goes on. Headache pain can be severe enough to impact basic functions like sleeping and holding down a job and people are looking for relief. Patients frequently focus on seeking help from the allopathic doctor or treating the symptoms through medication because they don’t think they have any other choice. I want to focus clinically on the unifying theme for all these headaches. The vertebrae and the skull bones are out of alignment in some manner. The surrounding muscles and soft tissue are also affected. Because of this, chiropractic care is very effective.

Repetitive stress, physical trauma, poor sitting, standing, or sleeping posture and unsupportive pillows are a few of the common causes of stress that allow the vertebrae in the upper thoracic and cervical spine to shift out of alignment. One other contributing factor of neck and skull stress actually comes from the feet.

The feet and arches play a crucial role in neck/head stability

Almost all the patients I treat have some degree of pronated or flat feet. If you observe the Crooked Person diagram, it displays a typical human being in the weight-bearing position. Excessive foot pronation, or collapsed arches, occurs in both feet with one foot usually being flatter than the other. If we notice, the left foot is over-pronating worse than the right foot.

The left, excessively pronated foot causes inward rotation of the tibia, kneecap, and femur bones. The pelvis tilts left causing further rotational stress up the Kinetic Chain to the spine, neck, and head. After unleveling the shoulders, the stress from the feet goes right up to the neck, occiput, and the jaw. The further away the symptoms are from the feet, the more likely a chiropractor is going to forget to check the feet. In a headache patient, especially in the insidious onset of the headaches with no causative mechanism, don’t forget to check those feet. The link all the way up to the neck and skull will shock you.

A chiropractic checklist for a general headache patient

It’s nice to have protocols and lists of what to treat so you can always see what you have done and what you have left to do. Over time, you learn and memorize these steps so you will not forget what to do. The headache patients I treat really respond to the following protocol.

For headache patients of any kind, check the following:

1. All three arches of each foot and their visual effects on the axial Kinetic Chain up to the head.

2. Bilateral Shoulder joints (GH, AC, SC, Scapulothoracic, upper ribs front and back)

3. Upper thoracic spine

4. Cervical spine, especially upper

5. Occiput

6. TMJ

Those pesky shoulders

It is common that I will find shoulder joint misalignments on one or both shoulders with headache patients. These misalignments create muscle hypertonicity, reduced ROM and limitations that directly involve the neck and skull. If you find right shoulder joints out of alignment, do not be surprised to see the right neck, right inferior occipital and right atlas laterality. The patterns are present and they are consistent.

The TMJ, occiput, neck relationship

It is rare I do not find the TMJ involved in any type of headache. Tension headaches coming from the shoulders or upper/mid-back are one of these exceptions. Much of the time with a headache patient, I find that the side of the TMJ involvement coexists with ipsilateral occipital inferiority, laterality of the Cl lateral mass, and contralateral C2,3 rotation, which also correlates with palpation.

An example is when a patient is lying supine and I palpate and find suboccipital hypertonicity on the right side (worse than the left). I normally find there is right Atlas laterality, the right TMJ is out of alignment and the left C2,3 region is out of alignment. Just flip the findings for the left side (i.e. left suboccipital, left TMJ, left Cl lateral mass). Adjusting all these areas to “reset” their neck, head and jaw helps tremendously and efficiently. The jaw, occiput and upper cervical must be addressed in any headache patient to help things calm down and hold in better alignment.

Don’t forget the feet and arches

You would be surprised how many patients are dumbstruck by how much their flat feet are influencing the stress on their neck, head, and TMJ. I show them the exact diagram included above and they stand in front of me while I point out what is going on in their body. Educating the patients on the biomechanics and stress patterns gives them the knowledge and options for helping themselves. I show patients why a pair of custom, flexible orthotics that support all three of their arches help restore healthy function of the Kinetic Chain and ultimately their neck and head.

As providers of natural, proactive care, chiropractors are in a unique position to address the root causes of issues like headache pain in a noninvasive manner. It’s recommended that you educate your patients on the many conditions that could be treated successfully through chiropractic treatments. Initial exams are a great time to do this, but you should continue the conversation as part of ongoing care. Chiropractors are successful at finding and removing subluxations, supporting the arches and the whole body and relieving the effects of headaches of all kinds. Let’s make sure your patients know that too.

Kevin M. Wong, DC is a graduate of the University of California, Davis, and a 1996 graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic West. He has been in practice for over 25 years and is the owner of Orinda Chiropractic & Laser Center in Orinda, CA. As a member of Foot Levelers Speakers Bureau since 2004, Dr. Wong travels the country speaking on extremity and spinal adjusting. See upcoming continuing education seminars with Dr. Wong and other Foot Levelers Speakers at www.footlevelers.com/continuing-education-seminars.