ARE YOUR HEADACHES COMING FROM YOUR NECK?

By Biagio Mazza

Today we are going to discuss trying to figure out whether or not your headaches are coming from your neck, or from some other area of the body.

There are lots of things that can cause headaches, but one of the prime causes is your neck. The neck can refer pain up to the headache. The neck can trigger migraines. It can do all sorts of crazy things that are really started from an area other than your head itself that can still create the same headache pain as if you did have some other issue.

Here's the top three ways that you can kind of tell that that's what's going on:

1. Your pain starts at the neck before it comes up into the head or before you feel it in other areas of the head. If you have pain that starts, a lot of times, at the base of the skull that then radiates up into either the back of the head, around the head, some people can feel it through the eye, or other different areas, then that's a pretty significant sign that your neck may be contributing to your headaches.

2. If you can reproduce your head pain or headaches with neck motion. If you move your head in various directions, whether it's front to back, side to side, or turning around, and you can make the headache symptoms come on with that, that also is a sign that your pain may be coming from the neck itself.

3.If you are taking headache-specific medications like migraine medications, and they don't work, there may be some other cause, and the neck can be one of those things.

It's not the case with every single headache, for sure, but the neck is a cause of a lot of headache issues. Those are just some simple things you could look at to give you a hint that the neck may be contributing to your specific type of headaches.