According to the American Chiropractic Association, 9 out of 10 Americans suffer from headaches. If you are someone who suffers from headaches regularly, you are familiar with the traditional methods used to treat them – lying down in a dark room or popping a pill or two. Even if this or another method works to alleviate the symptoms, you are still not addressing the core causes of headaches and are therefore missing out on permanent relief.The majority of headaches originate from the muscles, joints and/or nerves of the neck. With a common headache that stems from the neck, pain is first experienced at the base of the posterior skull and then radiates forward into the temples, eyeballs, and/or forehead.Typically an increased amount of stress and tension held in the shoulders causes contractions of all the surrounding neck muscles. Combine this with the poor posture that most people exhibit on a daily basis at their work desks and the muscles required to hold your head up can become overworked. When these muscles over-contract, vertebrae can become misaligned and their range of motion restricted causing pressure on spinal nerves, and ultimately painWhen someone comes to us suffering from headaches we focus on the cause, considering all of the patient’s environmental factors such as posture, work habits and daily activities. An adjustment corrects spinal misalignments and relieves pressure and pain. Relief may be experienced immediately and can last for hours to days. However, long-lasting headache relief requires restoring the balance and range of motion to the spine, thus allowing the body to return to a calm state.By focusing on the neck dysfunction we are actually addressing the cause of your headache; whereas medication is merely dulling your perception of it. A report released in 2001 by researchers at Duke University found that spinal manipulation resulted in almost immediate improvement for headaches originating from the neck, and had significantly fewer side effects and longer-lasting relief of tension-type headaches than commonly prescribed medication. Combining the adjustments with therapeutic modalities and/or recommended exercises over time is designed to eliminate the true cause of the issues behind the headaches.