Cervicogenic Headaches: Research Confirms Spinal Adjustments Are the Most Effective Treatment

In this episode of Ask The Chiropractor, Dr. Brant Hulsebus discusses cervicogenic headaches, their symptoms, and effective treatments based on recent research. He explains how these headaches originate from the neck and typically present on one side of the head. Dr. Hulsebus also delves into a recent PubMed paper comparing various treatments like chiropractic adjustments, physical therapy mobilizations, and massages. The findings strongly support chiropractic adjustments as the most effective treatment for cervicogenic headaches, surpassing other methods. He outlines the typical process of chiropractic care and emphasizes the importance of consulting a chiropractor for issues related to spinal health.

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Transcript

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Hello, Dr. Brant Hulsebus here and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask The Chiropractor is my little podcast that I do when someone has a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I try to answer. I'm a chiropractor here in Rockford, Illinois. I'm a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic, and I'm happy to be the team chiropractor of the Rockford IceHogs. Let's dive into it. hello and welcome to another episode of As the Chiropractor. Today we want to talk about cervical genetic headaches. Now, another neat piece of research came out just recently talking about the. Cervical genetic headaches and the best course of action to correct these, treat these and make these less of a pain in the butt, more or less. Let's talk about it. So no. Many of you have heard me talk about PubMed before. PubMed is a place where you can go find research papers that almost every type of physician will agree with and not argue that it's not good research. It's very easy to find bad sources of research papers. A lot of journals will publish just about anything. PubMed goes through scrutiny to make sure what they publish is able to be replicated and that the research methods were properly performed. I don't always get along or see eye to eye, I should say, with some of my providers that I see for myself, but when I walk in with a PubMed paper, the argument's over. So let's talk about this PubMed paper. This PubMed paper comes from F-R-O-F-R-O-N-T, front N-E-U-R-O-L, front neural 2025 May 16th is called the Comparative Safety and Effect. Of manual therapy interventions for cervical genal headaches, a system review and a network metal analysis. So this is a fairly recent paper, and the goal of this was to evaluate and compare the safety and the efficiency of spinal manipulation, chiropractic adjustments, mobilization, which you might get a physical therapist and massage for the management of cervical genal headaches using different techniques, evaluating all the previous literature. It. First, let's talk about what a cervical genetical headache is. A lot of people might say that's a great talk about the headaches. Is this one that I have. Cervical genetic means cervical. Cervical, that's your neck. And genetic means it comes from. So this is a headache that comes from your neck. Now these headaches are usually unilateral, meaning that they only happen on one side of the head. Sometimes it might be on both sides, but typical presentation is, it just hurts on this side of my head. The pain often starts in the neck and goes to the back of your head, the occipital region, and it comes up to the temples and foreheads and around the eyes. Typical findings with this also are neck pain or neck stiffness. Hence it comes from the neck. So you'll see that you can't turn your head all the way or bend your head all the way in one direction and neck. Comfort. Neck, excuse me, neck discomfort usually precedes this. So usually you have stiff neck for a few days, and now we're getting a headache. Now what can make these headaches worse is by certain neck movements. So if I go like this, ow, I'll turn my head this way, my neck hurts more. So it's important to notice that's a one of the triggers that could be stretching this. Another one might be having bad posture. Too long. I fell asleep in the chair and I woke up with a really bad headache. That could also be a cause of this. These are usually dull, non throbbing kind of headaches, unlike a migraine headache. They're just there. They're annoying. It's associated with neurological symptoms are less common. The biggest one that you would see is probably arm your shoulder pain, and that's probably more from the neck. And every once in a while people complain about a little bit of vertigo or dizziness. There is no light sensitivity to this one. This is not like a typical migraine headache. This is a different type of headache. So that's typically what we see in these. So that's a cervical gen headache. Now they want to compare doing the different treatment courses and which one was the best and showed the best outcome. I'm very happy to say that it wasn't even a close second. The chiropractic adjustments showed to be the number one treatment for this number one thing you could possibly do in order to make these headaches go away and to treat these headaches, chiropractic adjustments just way above and beyond everything else. Now, the mobilization, the massage, again, mobilization, something that your physical therapist might work you through trying to. Twist and stretch different areas. That was, it was pretty good. It was better than massage, actually, which kind of surprised me. Massage came in last, but it was interesting to see that those two things are still good. They're still beneficial. It's not like they're not good. They're just not as good as they're affected as a chiropractic adjustments. Now the research did show that having the combination of all the things was a great way. Start off by getting your neck adjusted with your chiropractor, and then work your way to the physical therapy and the massage to compliment the previous adjustment. So if this was me, I would get my chiropractic adjustment, maybe go through some mobility exercises afterwards. And lastly, follow up with a massage therapist. If these were something that was really bothering me now, maybe the chiropractic adjustment will be enough. Just get your chiropractic adjustment and you'll be done. But someone who one time had headaches, I do know that I would do anything I could to get rid of them as fast as I could. So I would definitely follow up on maybe doing all three of these things if there was that troublesome to me that frequently or that much interfering with my days of everyday activities. So the best thing to do is go see the chiropractor and get your neck looked at now. Why the chiropractor? Why the chiropractor do so good? Because we work on the range of motion when we do a chiropractic adjustment. Range of motion is the things that we test before and after we do chiropractic care. So we know the range of motion improves mobility works in the range of motion. Chiropractic adjustments also free the joints up, which gets rid of all the muscle tension. The muscle tension comes from, the joints are misaligned. The muscles lock up to protect them, to help further damage when the two bones are misaligned. This is called the subluxation. You've heard me speak of this several times. The subluxation exists, the body locks that area down, so going in, getting a massage will break some of that tissue up. However, if the chiropractic adjustment can do it, one would argue that maybe the massage isn't as important. So we have here is we have a chiropractic adjustment that restores a range of motion and also helps with the angry muscle. But more than that, more than any of that, chiropractic also helps with neurology. What do I mean by that? We know that your nervous system can be in two different modes. The autonomic nervous system, it's either in fight or flights or it's normal. So when you get your chiropractic adjustment, we take you out of fight and flight and bring you back to normal. That's been proven by different studies too on PubMed, the different podcast, different day, different time. We can talk more about that some other time, but it's been proven to work. So what do we know about the chiropractic adjustment versus mobility and massage? It adjusts everything the mobility does. It adjusts everything the massage does, but there's also a very big neurological component of that chiropractic adjustment that the other two lack, which would explain a lot of the reasons why the chiropractic adjustment would be more beneficial than the other two. Again, mobilization is good, massage therapy is good, but the chiropractic adjustment is better. I would definitely consider doing all three. Now, what could you expect if you're watching this and you want to go to a chiropractor and you're curious about starting care? I'll answer that question here in my office. Just like any other doctor's office, you start off by filling a complete medical history. We would obtain any records we need to get from previous providers. What would those be? For the most part, just any kind of range of motions, tests you've had in the past and or previous x-rays that you've had in the past. In my office, if you don't have previous x-rays or recent x-rays, we would take new x-rays, update them. Then we'd go through a chiropractic exam. The chiropractic exam would probably see how far you can turn your head or not move, turn your head. We'd probably have you lay down and turn your head while you're laying down to check the B mechanics of your spine to see how things are moving and twisting as you're moving and twisting so we understand the big picture. From there, we would combine our exam findings and our x-ray findings and your history. And we would be able to find a precise chiropractic adjustment that we would make. And when I say precise, we are aiming for specific vertebras. Here you see some videos online where they just grab the whole neck, put a rope around, a pole on you do other things. That's just totally aggressive. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about being very specific and finding the exact level and giving it a chiropractic adjustments. After your chiropractic adjustment, we would recheck your major motion, see how you did after the adjustment, and then. We would determine a care plan based on your response. Now, there's not a black and white care plan for this because everyone's x-rays. That's different. How long you've had this. What other traumas have you had in your neck? What other health, how, where are you in the healthcare spectrum as far as being healthy, unhealthy? These are all factors that go into your care plan and recovery. This is the kind of things you should expect if you go see a chiropractor for this. So let's walk away with the last couple of things that to keep in mind a couple actionable takeaways here after I summarize what we would do as a chiropractor. Oh by the way, a lot of times immediately following the adjustment, patients are automatically start feeling relief. Not every time, but a lot of times they automatically say, man, my heads already feeling better. So here's some things to take away from this. One. If you're having cervical genetical headaches, great place to start, which is with the chiropractor. Number two, mobilization and massage therapy are good. They're good complimentary things, good things that go along with the chiropractic adjustment, but if you really want the relief of this, the chiropractic adjustment is head and shoulders above the rest of them. Get a customized treatment plan from your chiropractor aimed at you, not something somebody else did, or something somebody else did. You should get, your chiropractor should be able to come with a care plan directly for you. Chiropractor should be able to give you. Times when they think we're gonna start seeing changes and goals of setting longer your care plan. And you should be able to ask the chiropractor questions and get involved in what's going on. This is my 2 cents how we do things here. Now, if you go see a primary healthcare provider or somebody else, even a massage therapist or a physical therapist, do they typically say chiropractic first? Only extremely rare cases. That's the whole reason I have this podcast, is to get the board out, get the message out about what we can do as your chiropractor. It. So if you have a question about this or anything else, delay into chiropractic care, the only person qualified to answer those questions are a chiropractor. Make sure you always follow up with a chiropractor. You can go to chiropractic.org org, that's our national association. Find all kinds of good things about chiropractic there You can go to your state associations. I know here in Illinois we have the Illinois Prairie State Chiropractic Association. If you wanna look for a chiropractor. Close to you in Illinois, but every state has a state association. Again, chiropractor.org also has every state listed. You can find chiropractors there. You can also find research and information there, so I highly recommend checking those out. But if you really wanna check out more about chiropractic, you need to go to the source, not to medical source, not to a dentist, not to a hairstylist. You need to go to a chiropractor for chiropractic questions. And if you want me to answer your question, feel free to leave a message or a comment wherever you're listening or watching this. And perhaps next week, you'll be the topic of the week. Thank you for tuning in, and we'll talk to you again next week.