What Causes Headaches?

If you’re someone who suffers from chronic headaches, you know how debilitating they can be… To make matters worse, if you visit three different doctors trying to treat them, you could get completely different diagnoses. Even if you get the same diagnosis of migraines, for example, there can be disagreement between doctors about the cause of those migraines or the most optimal treatment.

If you’re more of an “occasional” headache sufferer, perhaps you’ve wondered why some headaches go away on their own, while others linger for several days. Or why does an over-the-counter pain reliever help one type of headache, but not another? And why do some headaches erupt after eating certain foods, while others seem to appear out of nowhere?

There’s one thing all headaches have in common: They’re warning signs from the body that something isn’t right — like an alert message from within saying “attention is needed.”

The easiest example of this is a hunger headache. Go too long without eating and you’ll inevitably develop a dull ache within your head that you need some food.

Unfortunately, cause and effect isn’t always this easy to recognize.

There’s one group of headaches that chiropractors have had considerable success managing — they’re known as cervicogenic headaches. When the position of your head creates added stress on the muscles and joints of the neck, you get headaches classified as cervicogenic.

As a chiropractor, I wish that spinal adjustments had a positive effect on all forms of headache, and some might argue they do — but the important factor here is knowing whether your headaches have a measurable cause due to head/neck misalignment (also known as Spinal Imbalance).

At Chiropractic Saint Louis in Webster Groves, we’ve helped hundreds of headache sufferers achieve long-lasting results. If you experience headache-type pain towards the front of the head, around the sinus area, or an achy feeling across the base of your skull, I would encourage you to meet with us to see if the cause of your discomfort originates in the neck. If so, we may be able to help you as well.