Chronic pain in the neck and shoulder area is a condition that millions of people in the UK wake up to every day. The natural elasticity of our bodies can be unbalanced by work, leisure and medical reasons; when seeking treatment, it can be useful to identify why you may have courted these symptoms in the first place, if only to remedy what’s gone wrong for the future.
With this in mind, let’s examine the 5 common causes of shoulder and neck pain, shedding light on the culprits for chronic debilitation:
Exercise
Working out is good for us, but too much strain on certain muscle groups can do serious damage to our fascial network, especially after a long abstinence from exercise. Bending and lifting heavy weights can be harmful if your head isn’t positioned correctly, along with ignoring bends at the knee supporting a straight back. That longed-for post-gym burn can avalanche into a chronic pain condition under your nose if you aren’t careful.
Office Work
Unless you have a job in the great outdoors, chances are most of your days are spent hunched over a PC screen. Unsurprisingly, the human body hasn’t evolved to stare at one position for hours on end. It’s easy to forget about this if you’re concentrating or under pressure to finish an assignment, so it’s important to take small, occasional breaks to get up and knead out that tension.
Posture
Posture affects us all of the time, whether we know it or not. The way we sit in a chair, our running positions, even how we direct ourselves down a crowded street… all of this, and more, can light the spark of myofascial dysfunction. Retraining your body to adopt a healthy posture is one of the best methods for banishing chronic pain symptoms.
Sleep
Lying in bed at night, you surrender to your coiling limbs, and sometimes wake to aches rippling through the neck area. If you persistently twist face-down on the pillow, that irritation might blossom into something much worse that lasts more than a morning. Similarly, arms can be flung out in all sorts of shapes, putting strain on your shoulders if there’s a weight pressing down on them.
Trauma
Unfortunately, as anyone who’s ever been through a serious accident can attest to, the road to recovery doesn’t end with the initial ‘healing’ process. Whiplash, a heavy fall, or numerous other injuries can leave lasting marks on your body’s nervous system.
This makes you likely to sustain a spectre of the accident’s effects, or even experience pain in a completely different part of you, as your fascia tightens in a misplaced recovery response.
Whatever the source of shoulder and neck pain, or chronic migraines begging to be absolved, we don’t want you to suffer in silence. Regain Pain Management will explore where your symptoms may have come from, and what we can do to set things right. Contact us to learn more about how pain therapy can help you.
11th May 2020