Headaches, Neck Pain, & TMJ Pain
You don’t have to just deal with head, face, or neck pain.
Any pain around your head, face, and neck can be irritating at best and debilitating at worst. It really impacts your concentration, mental focus, and ability to interact with people around you.
“Little” things like talking, chewing, sitting, and concentrating don’t seem so little anymore when you can’t do them! We are here to help you not only feel better, but regain your ability to think, move your mouth, work, and focus throughout the day.
Not only have our physical therapists undergone extra training to effectively diagnose and treat headaches, neck pain, and TMD, these are some of our favorite problems to treat! There are simple and effective strategies we implement to help you feel better than you thought you could.
Trauma informed.
Resilience focused.
Hope infused care.
Headaches
There are many different types of headaches and it is possible to experience multiple kinds of headaches at the same time. Some of them, such as tension headaches and cervicogenic headaches, actually originate from muscles and joints in the neck.
Cervicogenic headaches involve pain on one side of the head. They typically start at the base of the skull and wrap up around the ear to the front of the head or behind the eye. Pain can also be felt in the neck and shoulder on the same side. Sustained posture and neck movement can exacerbate cervicogenic headaches.
Tension headaches can be experienced as pain or tightness originating in the neck or base of the skull, sometimes wrapping up the back and top of the head to the forehead. Tension headaches can also include pain or tightness in the eyes, ears, jaw, and teeth. Some people describe tension headaches as a vice wrapping around the head. Sustained posture, repetitive upper body activity, and stress can exacerbate tension headaches.
For both cervicogenic and tension headaches, what you need is treatment directed to your neck to help your headaches. It is possible to cure or vastly improve your headaches with physical therapy treatment.
We can also help with migraine. Although we may not be able to eliminate all migraine symptoms, many of our clients with migraine and other mixed type headaches notice a good deal of improvement!
Neck pain
Neck pain is one of the most common things we treat here at Empower Physio and Wellness. Our physical therapists have also had personal experiences with neck pain, so it is near and dear to our hearts and we love treating it!
Neck pain has many causes, including posture, stress, and overhead lifting. Neck problems can also be related to shoulder pain, pain or muscle tightness around the shoulder blade, and pain, numbness, or tingling down the arm. All of these symptoms respond so well to physical therapy care targeted to the neck!
Oftentimes, people have had imaging that shows changes in the discs or joints of the neck. This usually brings up a lot of fear about “making the damage worse” or how things could progress and leave you in the same strugglesome situation you see your parents endure.
Research shows that imaging has a very poor correlation with how you feel physically. Thousands of people with no pain have the same kinds of imaging findings you may have received.
What is the underlying issue then?
The underlying issues are MOVEMENT and INFLAMMATION problems!
It is important to note that these things cannot be identified on an image or fixed with surgery.
What does work for neck pain? Improving your mobility, increasing overall health of your tissues, building muscle strength, and moving better.
The neck is oftentimes an underlying factor in headaches and TMD (temporomandibular disorders, aka jaw pain) and must be treated to effectively improve head and jaw pain.
Within our holistic model of care, we identify the underlying cause(s) to help get your neck moving and feeling so much better.
Jaw pain and TMD (temporomandibular disorders)
We can help with all kinds of jaw related problems like clenching, grinding, popping, clicking, locking, pain, and tightness. The jaw is a joint surrounded by muscles, just like any other joint in the body, and responds very well to physical therapy care.
Even if you use a night guard for clenching and grinding, we can help you reduce your clenching and grinding and provide relief to the muscles so you don’t wake up so sore in the morning.
Research shows that all people with TMD have problems in the neck that influence the jaw. Simply treating your neck can help your jaw feel better! We are expertly trained to address all these parts of the body to maximize healing.
We understand that receiving treatment to your jaw can be a vulnerable thing. We will help you feel safe and supported at each and every visit.
Our Philosophy
At Empower Physio and Wellness, we value trauma informed, resilience focused, hope infused care.
We are trauma informed because people almost always have at least a small trauma experience connected to their current limitation. Trauma is as simple as being in pain or being unable to do something you value. We consider these past traumas, big and small, and how they are currently affecting your life.
We are resilience focused because physical and mental resilience are so important for thriving through life. We guide you in maximizing physical and mental strength so you are equipped with the tools you need to handle future challenges life throws at you.
We are hope infused because hope is sorely lacking in the current health space. We are positive and honest with you about your current limitations and infuse hope in what your future life can look like. The sky is the limit for what you can achieve.
Above all, we are focused on YOU. You get your physical therapist’s full attention because we love getting to know you super well! Our focus is to give you what you need at each session, always thinking outside the box.
Let us bring joy and peace back to your life. With our expert guidance, you can get back to the life you love faster and with more ease than if you tried to figure it all out yourself.
We got you. Let us take the guesswork and shopping around out of the equation so you can get back to doing the things you love with the people you love most.
Our process at Empower Physio and Wellness
-
Calm
Let’s be honest, you’re here on our website because you want to get out of pain. That’s why calming pain is our first step. Once we have a very clear picture of what the problem is, we implement simple and effective strategies to start bringing your pain levels down right away. We don’t believe that you have to do 15 exercises every day for three months in order to start seeing results. Most of our clients start feeling better after the first one or two visits.
-
Retrain
Most aches, pains, and injuries come about because of movement compensations over time. That’s why it is important to re-train and optimize the way your body moves. We also focus on re-training your brain and nervous system to better process stress and optimize recovery so that you build overall resilience.
-
Empower
Once you are feeling and moving better, it’s time to get you strong! Stronger people are harder to kill (literally…studies show strong people have a 25% less likelihood of premature death). Current research emphasizes the importance of muscle strength, so in this phase we are locking in all the great work we did in the first two phases with building muscle strength. And we don’t mean 2-lb curls. We prescribe robust, total-body strength in a way that is super accessible to you.
-
Empower PLUS
At this point, you are feeling awesome! We see it all the time that our clients want to do things they never thought they could do- go on an adventure vacation, play on the ground and run around with their grandkids, do a 5k race or even a half marathon, be active and present in the moment (instead of analyzing if they’ll pay for it the next day)…the options are endless. We are here to support you throughout life, help you continue to feel great, and offer body tune-ups–bodies need regular attention just like cars do. Whatever you need, we got you.