Why We Look at the Neck
So, if you’re having regular headaches, why should you have X-rays taken of your neck?
Hi, I’m Dr. Aaron Wall with Gateway Chiropractic in Fort Worth, Texas. That’s a question that I think most of you watching this video who have headaches might not have ever thought about: having your neck looked at as the reason you’re having these headaches.
So, I want to break this down for you with a little bit of an anatomy lesson, but also explain why, when somebody comes into our office and they’re having migraines or any type of headache—cluster headaches, cervicogenic headaches, sinus headaches, tension headaches, you name it—we’re always taking a look at the neck. The alignment of the spine has everything to do with it.
How the Nerves and Arteries Affect the Brain
Just from an anatomy standpoint, the nerves of our neck control a lot of functions. They control all of our muscles. They control our arms and hands.
You guys are going to look right here. These are arteries, and these nerves in our neck regulate blood flow from the heart all the way up to the brain. So, the brain would be sitting right in here with the skull. This is just kind of a model showing you that.
But you can see how the arteries branch up and go all through, giving your brain oxygen, blood flow, nutrients, and all that good stuff. When you’re in the right alignment, the body is very happy. You’re not going to have headaches because you’re getting the normal amount of blood flow to the brain.
What Normal Neck Alignment Looks Like
Normal is simple. Looking at me, your spine should be straight up and down. That one makes sense to most people.
From the side, though, our head should be over our shoulders, and we should have this C-shaped curve in our neck. When you have a curve like that, this is how we’re designed. It protects all the nerve holes for the nerves to come out of the spine and run organs, tissues, muscles, and all that.
Your discs stay healthy. The bones stay healthy. But check this out: blood flow is healthy. You’re getting the right amount of blood flow. Nothing is restricting that.
Why We X-Ray the Neck
One of the main reasons we X-ray patients who have headaches is to check the alignment of the neck, especially this top section. You can see where a lot of things loop around with the arteries. A lot of things happen with the nerves. Your vagus nerve comes out of here.
This is such a powerful area. These nerves deal with blood flow, blood pressure, balance, and equilibrium. They deal with your immune system, a lot of your glands, lymphatics, sinuses, and allergies. They control so much.
What we typically see with patients who have headaches is that the alignment is just off. There are a million ways that happens through sports, traumas, or auto accidents. It could be working a desk job on a computer with your head down for years or sleeping on your stomach. There are a lot of ways that our spine gets taken out of its normal position.
What Happens When the Neck Loses Its Curve
What we typically see in people who have headaches is that the curve starts getting lost. When you start losing the curve, it takes the cord and starts to pull and strain it. It just keeps it stretched like that.
That doesn’t just happen to the nerves. It happens to the arteries as well. So, you get strain on that. People are getting blood flow; they’re just not getting enough. As time goes on, this does lead to headaches.
A lot of people don’t know this, so they’ll turn to drugs, painkillers, NSAIDs—you name it—trying to kill the pain. I understand that if you’re in pain, you’re trying to get out of it. But you might have noticed that it doesn’t stay gone and keeps coming back. It’s because medication doesn’t fix a structural problem.
That’s where we come in. We have such a high success rate with people who have headaches, no matter the type, because we address the root cause.
What We Look for on an X-Ray
When we’re looking at an X-ray, we’re trying to see how much curve somebody has and how much they have lost. Is there a subluxation, which is what we call a misalignment of the neck, from behind or from the side?
I’ll show you how we do that. This is an example of why we X-ray our patients who we suspect have a subluxation and, in this case, are having a lot of headaches.
This is a big thing because this is a before and after of one of our patients who had a lot of migraines when she first came in.
A Patient’s Before-and-After X-Rays
This was her first X-ray on day one. When she came in, you could see that this yellow arc was a normal C-shaped curve. That’s where she should have been.
She was at negative three, so she had lost the whole thing. You can tell how straight her neck is. This is a line showing that her head is in front of her body.
Well, this didn’t happen overnight. It was a process, but she started to have fewer and fewer headaches as we were adjusting her neck and starting to work on bringing it back to a normal position.
You can see the difference here in these X-rays. This is about six months later. It’s night and day. She went from not having a curve at all to having about 33 degrees of curve. You can actually see it looking like that yellow line again. It’s starting to arc normally.
Her head even started to come back over her shoulder. So, this line goes through her neck, not in front of it.
As her curve started to improve, guess what happened? She stopped having migraines. She started having a decrease in frequency and a decrease in duration. Then she just stopped having them completely. She has been off her migraine medication for the last few months, and it’s been just a life changer for her.
Finding the Problem and Checking Progress
Just to answer your question about why we X-ray somebody who has headaches, that’s the reason. We X-ray to find out where to help adjust and locate the problem, and then we re-X-ray patients to check their progress. We get some amazing results that way.
Hopefully, that kind of just blew your mind about why you should have your neck X-rayed if you have headaches of any type.
If that makes sense to you and you’re like, “Man, I need to go check these guys out,” we’d love to help you. We’d love to get you feeling and healing better.
There’s a “Schedule My Appointment” link at the side of this video you’re watching. Do yourself a favor, click on that, get a time in our office, and let us start that healing process and get you back to better function.
Hopefully, that helped make sense to you a little bit. We’re so glad that you were able to watch us on this video, and we’ll catch you in the next one.
