Neck Muscle Pain

Very common in offices all over the country, muscle pains across the back of the neck and shoulders are the torment of our age! But for a lot of patients visits to the GP will only result in the predictable, “it’s a muscle problem” diagnosis. If you’ve read any of our articles before, you’ll know that muscle pain is never a problem itself, but a symptom of a problem.

What Causes Neck Muscle Pain!

Neck muscle pain may as well refer to any sort of neck pain as most neck pain will involve a muscular reaction. To understand what causes neck muscle pain, you really need to understand the anatomy. Inflammation of damaged tissues will cause irritated nerves to signal the muscles to tighten up. And in other instances, joints in the spine that become irritated give a phenomenon known as referred pain. Some of the specific joints in your neck will refer pain to the shoulder muscle area.

In most cases, though there will be conditions which you will have (and are perhaps unaware of). These conditions can flare up from time to time for many reasons.

Conditions That Can Cause Muscle Pain

• Spinal Stenosis
• Disc Bulge or Herniation
• Degenerative Disc Disease (DDD)
• Facet Lock
• Ligament Strain
• Whiplash Injury
• Spondylosis
• Arthritis

These are just some of the conditions that can result in neck muscle pain. They normally fall into two categories:

Category One, Clear Onset.

The first category is the easy one, things like whiplash, and ligament strains, and even disc herniations at times, often have a clear onset. They will have been done during a particularly memorable event i.e. the car accident 2 weeks ago. These sorts of causes are very simple to deal with.

Category Two, Not A Clue.

This category is, unfortunately, the significantly larger one for us. Most patients we see at The Mayfair Clinic will have no real onset date or event that stands out, the neck muscle pain will just be something that’s built up over the months or years prior to visiting the clinic. Normally there is a peppering of GP visits, scans that came back  “all clear” and the patient feels rather bewildered and confused as to why they have this pain! In this category, we have things like stenosis, spondylosis and DDD/ arthritis.

What Should You NOT Do If You Have Neck Muscle Pain?

In most cases, the muscle pain you feel on the back of your neck is because they are having to work overtime and are in an elongated position. This is normally associated with a reduction in the normal curvature of your cervical (neck) spine. If your spine doesn’t have its natural curve then the muscles have to work over time to make up for this loss of suspension.

Over the years we’ve seen thousands of X-rays and in the majority of cases of neck muscle pain, you see this abnormal spine. But the number one thing most people do is stretch their chin to their chest, similar to the picture at the top of this page! This is WRONG! Doing this only serves to stretch our muscles that are already stretched enough! This may feel relieving but in reality, it is only leading to your posture becoming worse and worse. Quite often after a long time of having this problem, you’ll notice the bones on the back of your neck become more prominent at the base (usually more visible on more petite ladies).

What Should You Do About This Sort Of Neck Pain?

Muscles always react to a problem, be it a specific trauma, or repetitive stress over months or years. Neck pain can be quite easy to treat if you focus on what is causing the neck muscles to become symptomatic in the first place.

First of all, if you have only had the neck pain for a day or so for no real reason, some gentle mobility exercises within a pain-free range will help reduce the seizing up of the muscles. Heat or ice applied over the neck for 5 minutes a couple of times during the day can also help the cause of the neck muscle discomfort or stiffness to subside as well. You could also just leave it and wait a couple of days for the problem to fix itself, be careful about this. It is fine, but if pain persists for more than a couple of days, call us or your local health care professional to examine things properly.

If you have had a specific injury, such as whiplash or a fall, then the treatment we do at The Mayfair Clinic can help significantly reduce your recovery time and increase the completeness of healing. The Clinic benefits for great relationships with other professionals and if you require any imaging for your injury then we are happy to refer you for imaging on the same day!

Sometimes your neck pain is something that has been going on for months or years, an unpleasant number of our patients will typically have this problem.Having been to the GP on numerous occasions, tried massage and other practices with little to no success, they end up at our door sometimes pre surgery or just after injections. The treatment our osteopaths do at The Mayfair Clinic is extremely effective at targeting the deep tissues of the neck and cervical spine. Examination and Diagnosis is always necessary to find just the right way to target the real source of your neck pain and by using our Therapeutic Laser Technology we can treat your injury in a way that far surpasses any “hands on” treatment.