It's hard to bear the neck pain, but anesthetizing it for a while will make it worse when you finally start feeling the pain. Don't think your pain is unprecedented in the history; many suffered severe neck pain and turned their wounds into wisdom just by selecting a proper neck pain treatment procedure.
The greatest wisdom is to know what is neck pain, its causes and symptoms, and how physiotherapy and its techniques can help you to overcome the pain.
Knowing Neck Pain
Neck pain is a common accusation prevalent among the people of all ages. The neck is made of vertebrae that extend from the skull to the upper torso. And it's the cervical discs that absorb the shock between the bones. The bones, muscles, and ligaments of neck supports the head of human body and allows for its motion.
Most of the people occasionally experience pain or stiffness in their neck. It could be for any reason like hunching over your workbench or leaning over the computer for a greater time. Neck pain is not a symptom of any significant problem, but if it is accompanied by numbness or loss of strength in your hands or arms or if you have shooting pain into down arms or shoulder, it should be consulted with a physiotherapist.
Neck Pain - Signs and symptoms
- Spasms and muscle tightness
- Mitigated and painful movement of head
- Headache
- And finally the pain that worsened with holding the head in one position for a longer time.
Neck Pain - Causes
There are a variety of reasons for neck pain like poor neck posture, wrong position of the neck while sleeping, working for a longer period without changing the neck position and having a jerk of neck while exercising. Apart from these common causes, there are some other reasons, listed below, that lead to neck pain.
- Injury: - In particular neck is vulnerable to injury, especially in car accidents, falls and sports, wherein the ligaments and muscles of neck are forced to come out of their normal range.
- Heart Attack: - At times neck pain is looked as a symptom of heart attack, but often it accompanied by other symptoms like sweating, nausea, shortness of breath, vomiting, arm or jaw pain.
- Meningitis: - It is an inflammation of thin tissues that surrounds the spinal cord and brain. Those who are suffering from meningitis have a fever and headache that occurs with the stiffness of neck. Even headache may also be like symptom of it.
Role of physiotherapists in neck pain treatment
Many a times doctors refer their patients to neck pain to a physiotherapist for their better treatment and healing of pain. Some techniques mentioned below are used by physiotherapists to cure neck pain.
- Deep tissue massage: -The method is use to target chronic muscle pain and tension in neck region. A therapists use to give direct pressure and friction to release the tension of tissues.
- Hot and cold therapies: - Hot therapy is used to push more blood to the target area as increased blood flow around targeted area brings more nutrients and oxygen to the affected area. While cold therapy reduces the circulation that allows mitigating inflammation, pain and muscle spasms.
- Trans-cutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS):- A physiotherapist use this machine to stimulate muscles through variable intensities of electrical current.
- Traction:- The Traction used by therapists to stretch and mobilize spine that allows free movement of neck and also reduces the pain.
