Tension Headaches vs. Migraines

Are you tired of retreating to a dark room or popping over-the-counter pills every time a debilitating headache strikes? You don't have headaches from a lack of dark rooms or a lack of medication—there is a mechanical issue going on inside your spine.

In this episode of Ask the Chiropractor, Dr. Brant Hulsebus breaks down the structural differences between migraines, tension headaches, and cervicogenic headaches. As a Palmer College of Chiropractic graduate and the team chiropractor for the Rockford IceHogs, Dr. Hulsebus shares how upper cervical misalignments place immense pressure on your brain stem and midbrain relay center. You will discover fascinating motion MRI insights that reveal how a precise adjustment restores critical cerebrospinal fluid flow and improves venous drainage to provide instant headache relief.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

• The true anatomy of the upper neck (C1 Atlas and C2 Axis) and why there are no spinal discs there to bulge.
• How "text neck" stretches the spinal cord and applies pressure to the brain stem via the dentate ligaments.
• The science of the pulsing migraine: How blocked venous return and trapped fluid toxins create intense pressure.
• Why feeling briefly lightheaded after an upper cervical adjustment means your cranial dam just cleared.
• The hidden tailbone connection: How a fixated sacrum stops your natural spinal fluid pump when standing up.
• Why you should always get a chiropractic adjustment before doing physical therapy posture exercises.

Have a question about spinal health? Leave a comment or message on our platforms, and you might be featured as our next question of the week!

👉 New Patients: Skip the wait and fill out your paperwork online here: https://hulsebuschiropractic.com/patient-intake-form/

📍 Visit Hulsebus Rockford Chiropractic:

• Address: 1877 Daimler Road, Rockford, IL 61112
• Phone: 815-398-3434
• Website: rockforddc.com

www.rockforddc.com

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, welcome to another episode of Ask the Chiropractor. Well, again, we're doing a 12-week series here, different questions I get asked a lot. This is episode three, week three. Today, I want to talk a little bit about headaches, tension headaches, migraine headaches, and how does chiropractors help people with headaches? Why do people with headaches go seek chiropractic care? Here in Rockford, Illinois, I have a lot of people that come in talking about their headaches, so let's kind of talk a little bit about headaches. We've all seen this before. We have a horrible headache. We want to go to a dark room, no noises, turn all the lights off, and just kind of hopefully sleep it off, or worse yet, maybe we're popping a bunch of over-the-counter medications hoping it would get rid of it. You don't have headaches from a lack of dark rooms. You don't get headaches from a lack of over-the-counter medications. There's more going on. So let's talk a little bit about the anatomy, what chiropractors look at, and what we do to help people with headaches. Some of the worst headaches I've ever seen with migraines has a lot to do with the spinal fluid and the venous return. You see, sometimes when people get a chiropractic adjustment to the upper cervical spine, your upper neck, immediately following the adjustment for about 10, 15 seconds, they can feel a little lightheaded, a little bit off. And my father and grandfather were both chiropractors, and in their time they were taught that that's probably just a blood rush after the adjustment going to the middle ear, and your body's harmonizing. And, and I was taught that too in chiropractic school. But we've got new science and new research, new tools that measure things. A person I got to meet and talk to with quite a bit at a seminar, his name is Michael Longyear. Just how it sounds, Longyear. And he has a motion MRI machine, and he's actually doing chiropractic adjustments under the motion MRI machine to the C1, C2, the first two bones in your neck, commonly referred to as the atlas, C1, and the axis, C2. You see, the C1 vertebrae is just a big ring with two big lateral masses on the side, and it's called the atlas 'cause it carries the head, named after a little Greek mythology. And the axis is a different bone too than all the other vertebraes. It has a big thing sticking straight up that the C1 wraps around, and it pivots on it, and that's how you tell people no, and that's how it got its name the axis. And there's no disc between C1 and C2, and there's no disc between the skull and C1. So when people have misalignments up here, a lot of times they think they have a disc bulge causing their headache, and I often laugh about that 'cause there's no disc there. It's usually pressure. It's usually what happens is people get really, really bad pressure on their midbrain. And so that causes horrible, horrible migraines. A- and your midbrain is your relay center. So the nerves go from the spinal cord to the midbrain, the midbrain to the brain, and then from the brain to the midbrain, the midbrain back. To do a midbrain exam on you, what we would do is we basically kind of do like a DUI test where we see your coordination, your balance and stuff like that. Because if your relay center is under stress, those things are ones of the first things that suffer. So if you routinely have these things and you have migraine headaches, that's an issue for us. Another common one that we get is called cervicogenic headaches. Those are actually by definition coming from the neck, and it has a lot to do with neck misalignments and altered biomechanics in your neck. And then we also have a tension headache. That feels like a tight band all around your neck. And we see a lot of that with, like, problems with your posture, problem with your neck alignment, stuff like that. So as a chiropractor, we do a lot of these. So now that I described these headaches a little bit to you, w- what happens when you go to the chiropractor? Well, when you walk into my clinic here in Rockford, Illinois, we're going to do a little bit of a history on you. We're going to do a, what we call a chiropractic exam. We're going to do, test different things, see how you move when you turn your head. Do your feet length change? And stuff like that. And then we're also going to usually take X-rays. We want to take X-rays for safety and to help us do a better job as a chiropractor Recently had a hockey player tell me every time he gets his neck adjusted it hurts really bad. He gets really bad headaches from it. When we X-rayed him, we realized that two of his bones in his neck were- he was born with them fused together. So as I tried to go in there and make those two bones that don't wanna move together move, they end up hurting him because they can't move, they're fused together. So as chiropractors, we want to eliminate that kind of variables and those kind of po- potential injuries, and those other ways of just not helping you, so we take the X-rays. The X-rays also show us your posture definitively. We see if you have a curve in your neck, or if your neck's straight up and down. You see, your spinal cord doesn't slide up and down. If it slid up and down, you'd be severing nerves whenever you had a really bad accident. The spinal cord's got ligaments that come straight out, they're called dentate ligaments, and they hold onto the sidewalls of the vertebral column to not allow your spinal cord to slide up and down. Well, if your neck's supposed to have a nice round shape to it, and you have what they call like a text neck or a military neck from looking down too much all the time, and you lose your cervical posture, it's straight up and down, that creates a lot of stress and pulling on the spinal cord. And because it can't slide up and down, the only thing it can give is actually pressure on the brain stem. The brain stem and the midbrain itself takes the blunt force of this with this being pulled down through the cranial cavity of the skull, down into the spinal canal. Now, earlier I talked about, you know, getting a little lightheaded after adjustment and how I was told that was you're getting a blood rush to your middle ear. Well, my friend with the motion MRI machine was able to prove that was not true. It's actually better than that. When you get the chiropractic adjustment, the midbrain will actually go from the spinal canal and pop back up where it's supposed to be inside your cranium. When this happens, the dam that is created by it being pulled down, restricting your spinal fluid flow, goes away. Your spinal fluid now starts moving, regenerating, and that's why you need a minute to reset as the spinal fluid starts moving again. When the spinal fluid can't regenerate, the toxins inside the spinal fluid get trapped inside your cranium, which results in horrible migraine headaches. The other part that happens is the venous flow coming out of your head is restricted. So the blood's coming in no problem, but trying to leave your head gets compromised. So it's flowing in no problem, but the blood flow is struggling to get out. And as we know, the arteries pulse, so when you get those pulsing migraine headaches, what's happening is the blood's getting up there, no problem, but it can't get out as fast, and it's really pushing against the veins, hence the pulsing noise. When the chiropractic adjustment occurs and the midbrain and stuff gets shifted, the venous flow improves as well, and that's reason number two you're slightly li- lightheaded after an adjustment. So when you get adjusted, you come up, you tell me you're a little lightheaded for, you know, 10, 15 seconds, I'm actually happy, because I just got rid of the headache that you didn't know you were gonna get. That is my hypothesis So that upper cervical adjustments are huge when it comes to helping the migraine headaches. We have a lot of people that come in, they turn the lights off in the room, they're laying down on the table. I come up, I adjust those two, I bring them up, and they leave happy. I see it all the time here in the clinic. The cervicogenic one, that's your posture now. What we're gonna do now is we're gonna adjust the lower part of your s- neck and the upper part of your neck where we see the misalignments or subluxations, and we're gonna free those bones up. And then what we're gonna do is we're gonna teach you neurological and musculoskeletal activities that you can do on your own to restore the neck curve. We're also gonna tell you the causes of how you lost your neck curve, because you need to know what you did to make it bad, so that way, the more of that you do, the more you must counterbalance it. The more… You know, a- around the holidays, we all eat a little extra junk food, and a lot of us pick up a little extra exercise or an extra diet to balance out the bad that we're doing. The same is true when your posture's been too bad for too long. You must fight back and do the opposite in order to restore it. You can't have negative without the positive. You have to do that to balance yourself out. And a lot of times that includes a good chiropractic adjustment to unlock it So I kind of hope I answered a little bit how we help with these different headaches. These are things that we see. There is one more rare one, like if you have a really bad migraine, you lay down, it instantly goes away. Every once, rarely we see this, but we have seen it, it's that your tailbone's misaligned, your sacrum. See, when you walk, your sacrum rotates back and forth and acts like a pump mechanism to keep your spinal fluid flowing. Well, if it's fixated, it's not moving, and you lay down, gravity changes, and now you can out- actually flush your spinal fluid around. But when you stand up, the pump's not pushing it back up again. It's not working. So if you lay down, headache gets better, you stand up, it goes away. Or excuse me, you lay down, it goes away. You stand up, it gets worse. When you're walking, then you need a good tailbone adjustment. Again, that's an easy chiropractic adjustment we do all the time So I hope I understand a little bit of the biomechanics of what's going on. I hope you understand that there's no pill that'll pop the cranium back inside the, the, the hu- put the s- nervous system back inside the cranium is what I meant to say. There's no pill that does that. There's no pill that w- can unlock your spine to make your neck move better. And when moving better, you improve your biomechanics, and you improve your biomechanics, your posture starts to accept the change. There's no real pill for that. There's physical therapy that tries to get your neck curve to come back. I've seen that. But the, the problem I run into is if you don't do chiropractic first and get the adjustment made first and get rid of the misalignment first, then you're always working, you know, one step forward, one step backwards. I ha- I, I cannot lie, I've worked with physical therapists. People have physical therapists that they, they know, love, and trust. And what we'll do is I'll do the chiropractic adjustment here, then they'll go see the physical therapist afterwards and work with them more aggressively on their neck curve I would say 95% of the time your chiropractor can give you those exercises as well. But if you'd like to work with a physical therapist, I would get my adjustment first and then go see the physical therapist afterwards to make the physical therapy work better and help the chiropractic adjustment hold longer. And we work with a couple different physical therapies here in town. So some questions I get a lot of times is people say, "I don't think I have a neck problem. I'm probably dehydrated." Yeah, dehydration definitely is a trigger that makes the headaches come. But if you're getting them all the time, and you say you're always dehydrated, I would say that two things could be true at once. You could have dehydration, but it, it's a more aggressive headache because of the misalignments on top of it. Another question I see a lot of time is, "How quickly do I get relief?" A lot of times it's instant. A lot of times people come with a bad headache, they get up, they're like,"Oh, it's gone." That happens more than anything else that we see here in the clinic as far as, like, instant relief. Other people it might, it might take a little longer. Kind of depends how long it's been there, the overall health of you and your spine, your lifestyles. So at, uh … If you have a headache and you suffer from headaches, going to see a chiropractor should be a no-brainer. You should definitely go see a chiropractor. Uh, hopefully your family doctor would tell you that, but if they haven't, it's because they don't know what we do. Asking them if you should go see us, again, they still don't know what we do, so asking them doesn't really make a lot of sense. I would definitely want to go see a chiropractor. Chiropractors should be objectively able to show you the test findings and the X-ray findings to show you how they think they might be able to help relieve your headaches by correcting the subluxation. Chiropractors should also give you a care plan of what they think it's gonna take to get you better, and if you have posture issues, introduce some things that make your posture better. Well, I hope I answered the question about chiropractic and headaches. If you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, like I said before, the only person really qualified to answer that is a chiropractor. Why don't you come back next week and we'll talk a little bit about how people ruin their posture, what they call text neck or having bad desk posture. We'll talk a little bit about that and what we look for and, and ways to make it better. Everyone tells me, "Don't worry, I have a standup desk." I … Come back next week, I'll tell you why that's not the, the, the answer. That's not gonna … It's, it's better, but it's still not the answer. Thanks for tuning in.