According to the Institute of Medicine there are 100 million Americans who suffer from chronic pain.
The National Institute of Health Statistics say’s that neck pain is the second most common pain condition (tied with headaches). At any given time, about 10% of us are suffering from neck pain. That doesn’t even include headaches, shoulder pain, upper back pain or arm pain which many times are problems stemming from the neck. It’s so common, and such a part of our lives that we even have a saying describing someone we don’t like: ’they are a pain in the neck’.
What needs to be understood is that your problem started long before you felt the pain! Unless your pain is stemming from an accident or trauma, your pain probably started developing a long time ago. Maybe it was that first car accident you had when you were a teenager. Maybe it was that football injury you had that you really never got taken care of, because you were ‘fine’ afterwards. Maybe it was carrying your laptop with you as you traveled for years. Maybe it’s your posture at the computer right now! Whatever it was, and it was probably several of these smaller trauma’s accumulating over the years, what is important now is not what caused your pain, but how are you going to help it now!
Neck pain comes from the nerves in your neck being irritated. Either bones, muscles or discs are the main culprits here. Medication doesn’t rely on any diagnosis or examination. Drugs that shut down or block the pain process in your body work, or don’t, independently of the cause of your pain. What that means is that drugs don’t help you resolve the issue of what is causing your pain. They may or may not work on a temporary basis, but the best option for long term relief is to address the cause of the pain.
Let’s look at the cause. The cause of your pain is that somewhere in your neck, you have something that is not functioning properly. Something isn’t working the way it is supposed to. Maybe it’s the discs between the bones. Maybe it’s the vertebrae themselves. Maybe it’s the muscles surrounding the spine. Only a proper examination can determine where the cause of your problem is.
Once the source of your pain is determined, then treatment is geared towards correcting the problem. For example, if your spine doesn’t move properly causing pain whenever you try to turn your head, taking pain pills won’t help that. Physical therapy won’t help that. Rest won’t help that. Avoiding activities won’t help that. Only restoring your normal function to your neck will relieve your pain. That’s why it really was not a surprise when the Annal’s of Internal Medicine determined that Chiropractic Care was the best choice for neck pain relief.
What is important is what is causing the bad functioning of your neck. What is important is restoring that function, getting your neck to work properly again so that it doesn’t put pressure on or aggravate the nerves that cause neck pain.