I want to talk with you today about natural treatments for neck pain. It surprises me, after being in practice for 26 years, how many people do not realize that “upper cervical” means the upper cervical bones or the top two bones in the neck. At the Upper Cervical Spine Center, this is our deal. We are neck pain specialists. We focus all of our attention on the neck for multiple reasons. One, the brainstem controls all functions in the body and is located in the upper cervical spine. Two, wherever the head and neck go, the rest of the body follows, creating compensatory changes throughout the body, which can cause neck pain, arm pain, leg pain, foot pain, knee pain, back pain; problems all the way up and down the spine.
Many Americans suffer on a regular basis with chronic neck pain. Believe it or not, neck pain is not caused by a drug deficiency! Taking your Neurotin, your Celebrex, even Tylenol and Aspirin, are never going to fix neck pain because neck pain is not caused by a drug deficiency.
What we have found is that neck pain, almost 100% of the time, comes from a bone being just slightly out of position in the neck, creating body imbalance. This imbalance makes one side of your body stretch while the other side contracts due to a loss of symmetry from the misalignment. The muscles do not like this. When they stretch, they will also contract to protect themselves from tearing, creating that neck pain that can even turn into headaches. It can affect nerves that go into the shoulders and down your arms into the hands.
At the Upper Cervical Spine Center, we focus all of our attention on finding a misalignment in the neck. That slight imbalance could be creating that short-term, or long-term neck pain. What we do is correct the misalignment in a very simple way. We do not put anything into the body. We do not take anything out of the body. We apply one very specific correction to whichever bone in the neck is causing the problem and then once we do that, the rest of the body starts to become symmetrical again, and those muscles that were stretched or contracted will start to ease off and rebalance.