Where does it come from? What causes it? And what can be done about it? Occipital neuralgia is a pain, often sharp, stabbing pain in usually the back of the head that can even radiate up the back of the scalp, and it is triggered by the occipital nerve, one of the three branches of the occipital nerve, sometimes even all three, which comes out right underneath the skull and goes back up into the back of the head, the scalp area. Now what causes it? Well, from my experience, almost a 100% of the cases I’ve seen have been caused from this top bone here being interfered or being out of the line and interfering, putting pressure on that nerve, causing the nerve to get irritated to get inflamed.
Sometimes, it’s just a matter of interfering with the normal transmission from the head, the scalp area to the brain, and the nerve gets interfered with and creates the pain sensation in the brain, which can be sharp or stabbing. Sometimes it’s often misdiagnosed as headaches, cluster headaches, even migraines. Now the typical medical approach is pain medication, anti-inflammatories, sometimes even anti-convulsants, which at the very best might temporarily mask the problem, but it doesn’t do anything to actually fix the problem. What we do at The Upper Cervical Spine Center is we have instrumentation to determine if there is some sort of pressure up here at the top of your neck that could be causing the occipital neuralgia. And if so, we make a very simple correction to take the pressure off the nerve so that then, kind of like taking your foot off the garden hose, you get full messages from the head to the brain, and nothing gets interfered with, and it takes away that pain sensation.
If you have occipital neuralgia or you know someone with occipital neuralgia, instead of temporarily masking the symptom, I suggest you try to find the root cause of your occipital neuralgia and get it corrected. Your best bet would be to find an upper cervical doctor near you. You can Google it or call our office. We’ll do our best to find the closest one. We never charge for the initial consultation just to find out where your occipital neuralgia is coming from. Once we know that, if it’s something we can help you with, we’ll explain to you what we need to do to fix it. If it’s not something we can help with, then we’ll at least try to find another specialist that we believe can get to the root cause of your problem. Get it taken care of once and for all.