In 1983, Dr. Ottar Sjaastad, a Norwegian medical doctor almost changed the game when it came to helping you manage your headache pain.
Almost?
Simply put, this information has never become part of the mainstream solution, leaving millions of headache sufferers left to deal with their pain.
Despite the absolute brilliance of his discovery, most practitioners (medical and non-medical) are STILL not applying his findings to help their patients.
To start, your headache pain is rarely caused by one single thing.
It’s usually a combination of many things like stress, dehydration, poor blood flow to your head, lack of sleep and a myriad of other factors that can contribute to your debilitating headaches.
This fact alone makes successfully diagnosing and treating your headaches a painstakingly difficult process for any healthcare provider, leaving you with no relief and a horrible nightmare that continues without hope.
What Was This Great Discovery?
Dr. Sjasstad discovered something that every headache sufferer, whether migraine, tension, cluster, primary, secondary, has in common…
That the structures of the neck play a pivotal role in the severity and cause of your headache pain.
More specifically, unless an emergency caused your headache, you probably have these three things going on in your neck:
1. Normal Imaging
2. Postural Distortions
3. Immobile Spinal Segments
It means that every time you have a headache, if you just made sure the structures of your neck were healthy (more on this shortly) you could fix your headache totally, or at minimum, make it feel better.
This also means that you’ve probably never looked closely enough at your neck for a potential solution.
If you’ve ever been to your medical doctor regarding your headaches, you likely had x-rays, MRI’s, CT scans or other diagnostic imaging that ALL had come back negative. This means that you had Normal Imaging.
Your medical provider did their job…they made sure there was no emergency causing your headache pain, but this still left you frustrated and most likely medicated.
What’s the Actual Cause?
As Dr. Sjasstad discovered, the reason that your doctor couldn’t find a cause for your headaches is because they have little to do with your head (what x-rays, CT’s and MRI’s measure) and everything to do with your neck.
You may have slipped through the cracks, but you know as well as I do, your headaches are very real.
One result from Sjasstad’s findings was that Postural Distortions can play a significant role in your headache pain.
In addition, many headaches sufferers demonstrated the presence of Immobile Spinal Segments.
This means that the vertebra that make up your neck don’t fully move in all directions that they should. The result is irritated and inflamed joints as well as dysfunction with the spinal cord itself.
The saddest part about Immobile Spinal Segments and Postural Distortion is these conditions don’t always cause pain.
This means they can be happening right now, and you won’t feel a thing.
If you recall, Dr. Sjasstad’s first finding was Normal Imaging. This means that your neck could feel fine, but the proper tests could still detect a problem.
The one thing I DON’T want you to do is nothing.
If you suffer from headaches and you’ve ruled out any emergency cause, there’s a tremendous chance you HAVE something wrong with your neck.
Please do something about it.
