Raise your hand if you enjoy getting headaches! Nobody? Not shocking at all, I must say.
For those that get frequent headaches, you know how (among other things) annoying they can be. In severe cases, they can be debilitating. Whether you get a headache only occasionally or quite often, they are not fun and you want them gone yesterday. Thankfully, we can help!
Massage therapy is finally gaining some ground in the western medical community. More and more often, we see clients looking for alternative ways to reduce pain.
There are a few different types of headaches, but the ones we work with most often are called tension headaches. Tension headaches can be triggered by a variety of factors including muscle tension, bone misalignment, eye strain and other musculoskeletal imbalances.
For massage therapists, the goal is to find the muscular tensions and imbalances that may be causing the headaches. It may be hard to believe, but those headaches are most likely not coming from your head! If you come to us for headache relief, you’ll notice immediately that we don’t just massage the head.
This is a fancy way of saying that though you may feel the pain in your head, it may not be the origin of the pain. For example, a trigger point in your lower trapezius can cause you to have pain (have a headache) around your occipital area. In other words tension in the lower trapezius is causing pain to be referred to the base of your skull. You can imagine that massaging just the head or scalp will do very little to eliminate the cause of the pain (trigger point in the lower trapezius).
Massage Therapy + Headache Treatments
It is because of these referral patterns and the body’s need for balance that we take a broader approach to headache treatments. Not only do we try to eliminate the source of the pain, but we also try to help the pain from coming back by working on balancing all the muscles involved so they function optimally. This often includes working on the pectoral, cervical, and back muscles.
To book your massage and get relief from your headaches, please call us 850-296-9035 or head on over to our Appointments page to schedule online.
