Top 10 Common Reasons For Neck Pain

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Neck problems are multi-faceted, multi-diagnosed problems. Generally speaking, people who have neck pain have a hard time localizing the pain, perhaps from their neck to beyond their shoulders, their forearms, up to their hands.

Whatever the cause may be, neck pains do not necessarily lead to surgical or medical treatments. In most cases, all you need is a TENS (transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) unit to deal with your neck pain.

However, before you decide to seek the help of your local chiropractor or the best tens unit for neck pain, read on below to find out what the top ten common reasons for neck pain are. This way, you can learn what to avoid in the future.

Top Ten Common Reasons For Neck Pain

For you to judge whether or not you would use TENS units, listed below are some common reasons for neck pain. Make sure to know the cause of your neck pain before taking treatments, medications, or therapies.

1. Forward Head Posture

Forward Head posture happens when you are working hours in front of your computer, driving, scanning your mobile phones, reading books, etc.

In a healthy posture, your ear should be aligned on the center top of your shoulder that if you were to drop a stone from your ear, it should hit the center top of your shoulders.

A forward head position is when you lose that position. When you have that proper ear-shoulder alignment, all of the vertebrae are stacked on top of each other. With that, the laws of physics and gravity are on your side.

On the other hand, if you have a forward head position, gravity tends to pull your head lower down, which adds an extra 20 to 30 pounds of stress on your neck, which primarily causes the pain.

2. Stress

Sprains usually cause pains experienced in the neck due to stress. When you are stressed out and overwhelmed by things happening around you regularly, certain hormones in your body are produced, causing your muscles to achieve a certain level of tautness. These taut muscles are what causes the neck sprains, which are the primary cause of pain.

3. Carrying Too Much Weight

Speaking of too much weight does not necessarily mean weight lifting and resistance training. Though in some cases, gym routines cause neck pains also, carrying loads such as a heavy backpack or a pail of water can be counted in.

On top of the weight, carrying the weight unevenly causes your spine to bend. Such improper bending eventually leads to pain and discomfort in the neck as well as the back.

4. Repetitive Motions

Neck pains can also result from moving the head in repetitive motions, side to side, or up and down. Activities such as dancing, exercising swimming, etc. may cause overuse of muscles, tissues, and ligaments around the neck. Mitigating or avoiding such activities, however, will help you ward off neck pain.

5. Hyperflexion

In traumatic incidents that are common among sports enthusiasts or by just merely ramming your head accidentally, your spine may be forced forward or hyper flexed. This hyper flexing will cause your vertebrae to compress the front of one or more of the intervertebral discs beyond normal limits.

Hyperflexion of the neck may have more adverse effects, such as the bulging of the intervertebral discs. Depending on its size and location, the bulge may push on or impinge one of your spinal nerves or your spinal cord causing pain and inflammation.

6. Awkward Sleeping Positions

If your neck is tender, has restrictions of motion, has a particular action that aggravates or relieves the pain points to a mechanical source of neck pain.

These pains or problems root in either the neck joints or the discs and usually happen after a wrong sleeping position where the joints or discs are forced into compression or contracts abnormally.

7. Osteoarthritis

Typically, persons suffering from osteoarthritis have dull aching pain on their necks usually on both sides and could go up towards the back part of the head and down the shoulders.

With neck osteoarthritis, stiff necks are dominant symptoms but are not limited to that. Other symptoms are creeping pains from the neck towards the back, changes in your balance and coordination, changes in handwriting or signs that are not correlated with neck arthritis. Examples of such symptoms are muscle spasms and headaches.

8. Whiplash

Whiplash a term that connotes the pain associated with it, is a neck injury generally from trauma. Whiplash can result from a car accident, a hard fall, or sports injuries. It is a sudden and unexpected motion of neck jerking, going forward, or often backward.

Symptoms of such neck injuries are neck pain, tightness of muscles around the neck, restricted range of motion, headache, and sometimes pain in the back.

9. Swollen Lymph Nodes In The Neck

Common among children and some adults, masses and lumps are often found in the neck. These lumps are lymph nodes, and these nodes tend to swell when they are faced with infections.

In the process of fighting infections and bacteria, swollen lymph nodes frequently get infected and are inflamed. Infections and inflammations of the lymph nodes are what causes the pain people usually experience around their necks.

10. PMR (Polymyalgia Rheumatica)

Polymyalgia rheumatica is an illness associated with pain and stiffness of the proximal extremities in the absence of muscle weakness.

PMR falls within what is called diffused soft-tissue rheumatism. The illness is related to a condition known as giant cell arteritis or temporal arteritis and often involves jaw claudication that causes blindness in individuals.

Conclusion

Neck pains shouldn’t be left unattended as you don’t deserve to experience such discomforts by any means. Before reaching out to your medicine cabinet for some pain killer, it is essential to determine first the cause of your pain.

Neck pains, depending on its degree and nature, may not necessarily need medication or treatments. Sometimes all you need is to block some signals and trigger some hormones to relieve yourself out of pain.

Not only that, you save yourself from the side effects of medicine or redeem yourself some money to pay therapists and doctors, but you are giving yourself a favor by healing in a non-invasive way.

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