At Home Trick for Instant Headache Relief in Portland, ME

Hi, I'm Dr. Rob Liguori. This is Dr. Chelsea Schultes with Chiropractic & Sports Health, here to talk about headaches and what a little trick you can do to help alleviate some of your headache pain, a lot of home.

At Home Cervicogenic Headache Relief

Now, I will preface this by saying that there are many types of headaches. This is one for a specific type of headache called cervicogenic. Headache, which is a big fancy name for meaning that your headaches are actually coming from your neck, or the little muscles that are right up at the base of your skull. And so those little muscles are actually what I'm going to target right now. Those are called suboccipital muscles, when they get tense, inflamed, become trigger points, they actually radiate a lot of pain up into somebody's head. It's a very common type of headache pain that we see at our office. So this little trick is what I like to teach a lot of patients so we're gonna show you now.

The Headache-Snag Exercise for Headache Relief

So here we have Chelsea, so what I had to do is take that band at home, even better than a band is just using a hand towel, roll it up into a cylinder and hold it in both hands, like so then she's going to bring it across the back of her head. Like that. Why don't you grip a little bit there, Chelsea, good. And then she's gonna fold it forward, like that. So we're on the corner here, you can kind of see from the side. So she's holding that in place like that. And what she's gonna do is with some tension, she's gonna pull forward on that band, while she does what's called a chin tuck, kind of tucking her chin back in in, go and tuck it and then she can hold so when she does that, what happens is you should feel a stretch right along the base of the skull here.

If you're feeling it right, right up in through here is where it should be that way. You know it's the right spot. So I'll help you. We'll hold that for about 10 seconds and then do some reps of that as well.

So that's called a headache snag. A great trick for you at home!

Learn more about Chiropractic Care and Headaches.