Craig Sather, Doctor of Physical Therapy 
The Neglected Neck Muscles How often do you check the muscles on the side of your neck? Check them often to see if they are tight and tender! That is, check them if you suffer from headaches, jaw pain and stiffness, dizziness, eye and ear pain or poor balance. Your problems may stem in whole …
Does Neck Cracking Help Headaches? Headache or neck pain afflicts many people for years. Therefore, people try all sorts of treatments to try to get relief. Neck cracking, or cervical manipulation, is a treatment option for headaches. But is it the best treatment for you? Theoretically, you crack your neck to put your spine into …
Stress, stress, stress. Who doesn’t deal with stress? You wade through your stressful situation much easier if you do not have migraines. Unfortunately, stress itself triggers your migraines. Consequently, your migraines compound the difficulty in getting through a stressful situation. Migraines create more stress, which leads to more intense headaches. How do you get out …
Body Mechanics Matter While the focus of this blog is on head and neck pain, this area is not isolated from the rest of our body. We will look at the rest of our system starting a little further down the chain. If one part of the chain is out of sorts, it affects areas …
INTERSECTION OF HEADACHE AND JAW PROBLEMS One of the main headache-producing muscles is the temporalis. It is depicted on the picture as covering a large swath of real estate on your outer head. The temporalis afflicts not only headache sufferers, but also people with temporomandibular dysfunction. Put your hand on the side of your head. …
HEADACHES CAN CO-EXIST WITH NECK AND BACK PAIN Headaches may be the end of the line for a spinal problem that migrates upwards from the lower spinal area. Look at the way Mateo in our photo is bending forwards. His lifting pattern may lead not only to back pain, but neck pain as well. The …
Your Poor Body Mechanics Tighten Your Headache Muscles Your headaches may build up from your day-to-day mental and physical stressors. You eventually reach a threshold where your headache pops out of the box from which it has been kept in. Therefore, it behooves you to remove every stressor that can build up to allow it …
Is My Headache Coming from My Hips? Refer to my December 13 blog about how a weak link in your muscular chain can occur in your hip or leg. As a result, the altered muscle firing patterns work their way up to your neck and produce a headache. The excellent diagram of how that complicated …
Where in My Head Does the Sternocleidomastoid Send Pain To? As we have seen from previous blogs, the sternocleidomastoid muscle is the muscle of the side of your neck that starts on your collarbone and projects to the area by your ear. Remember, a tight left sternocleidomastoid such as is pictured here limits neck turning …
Does Your Walking Posture Worsen Your Headache? Take a moment to reflect on your walking posture. Are you standing straight and proud? Do you instead find yourself with your head stuck forward, shoulders rounded and upper back slumped? If so, your headache-producing muscles are tight and ready to fire up your headache when the time …