Headache Trigger Point Release in Portland, ME

Hi, I'm Dr. Sean Murphy here at Chiropractic & Sports Health. And I'm here with Austin today to talk a little bit about headaches.

Common Cause Of Headaches

Okay, so a lot of people have probably had headaches, and a really common cause of them is these muscles up here at the base of your skull. Okay, so these muscles are called your suboccipital muscles, they attach the base of your skull to the top of your neck. And a lot of times, if your posture is not so great, or you have a lot of stress at work at home, these muscles can really kind of tense up and cause headaches that start at the base of your skull and go up and over into your head. Okay, so we have a lot of treatment options for that. And a lot of times what we will do is we'll work on some of the knots in these suboccipital.

Trigger Point Release For Headache Relief

So a knot or a trigger point is just a localized area of hypertonic muscles. So really tight muscle within a muscle. So what we do to treat that is a lot of times we'll do some myofascial work to kind of loosen up those muscles. But one thing that you can also do at home is just grab a tennis ball and add a little pressure at the base of your skull here either laying on the floor or against the wall, and that can help act as a little bit of a self massage here at the base of your skull to help alleviate some of those chronic headaches that you have.

Learn more about Chiropractic Care and Headaches.