In 1983, Dr. Ottar Sjaastad, a Norwegian medical doctor almost changed the game when it came to managing and helping you with your headaches.
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 headaches are 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 diagnosing and treating your headaches successfully, 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.
More specifically, unless your headache was caused by an emergency, you probably have these three things going on in your neck.
- Normal Imaging
- Postural Distortions
- 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 close 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 headaches, but this still left you frustrated and most likely medicated.
The reason, as Dr. Sjasstad discovered, that no cause for your headaches could be found is because the headache has 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 headaches.
In addition, many headache 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”, which 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.
Dr. Steven Gall has been offering exceptional chiropractic care to infants, children and adults for over 25 years. He has spent his life learning, and improving his knowledge, skills and ability to provide his care. As a public speaker and health coach he strives to assist people in seeing and attaining a life of extraordinary health. Contact the office to join others who have started the same journey.
