If you know about Chiropractic, then you may have heard the anatomical terms for the first and second vertebra just below your skull: the Atlas and the Axis. The atlas is like the gyroscope for your posture. After head trauma like whiplash, or say, falling off of a jungle gym, this area can get a bit misaligned. Stomach sleepers often throw themselves out over time because of the excess head turn for many hours of sleep. Symptoms can include migraine, headache, fatigue, changes in blood pressure and many other chronic pains. When the 'gyro' is no longer calibrated, a host of compensatory neuro-muscular imbalances attempt to keep you level with horizon. Imagine if the horizon line on an airplane was malfunctioning and the plane wanted to bank to the left because it thought left was actually straight forward. one engine could be turned up to compensate and keep the plane on a straight path. That engine is like your muscles. Some will start to tighten up to compensate for the imbalance and keep you going straight. Eventually, that little bit of extra tension becomes a problem, and eventually that problem presents as pain.

 While many chiropractors adjust the neck, very few do more detailed analysis to determine which directions are the optimum to adjust into. To be clear, most necks require mobilization and nothing more to improve symptoms. The Atlas complex can be a different beast, however. As you might imagine, if the Atlas is translated left, it seems obvious adjustments improving right movement would be ideal. Going left would simply compound the stress in the system. I have seen many patients with chronic headache (as long as a decade) that have completely gone of medications once this simple dysfunction is corrected and then reinforced over a few weeks.

Usually, the duration, intensity and frequency of the headache will give away in the history what type of problem the patient has. If you have headaches every day and they are consistent, typically it is coming from the neck. If you have periods of no headache followed by random spikes, it is more likely to be a metabolic/internal medicine issue. However, this is not always the case and a detailed exam is always helpful to determine your source of pain. The important piece is to never give up on finding a solution. 95% of Migraines are curable if not modifiable without long term medication use.

 I wish you the best of health.