How To Relieve Neck Pain

My name is Dirk Laubscher. I've been a physiotherapist for over the last ten years and working in Harley Street for the last six, and today, I'm going to talk to you guys about the causes and the management of back pain. How to relieve neck pain.

Again, neck pain is quite a common condition and it's usually because we all have very bad posture. Most of the people, you know, have a desk job sitting in front of computers and again, what happens with the neck usually with neck pain is the joints on the side of the spine, if you look at the neck, they sort of stiffen up, okay. And also, what happens when they stiffen up is you get tight spasms in the muscles right around there, okay.

Neck pain is also usually not the only thing that's wrong. Most people with neck pain have a lot of stiffness and problems here, okay. So, how we treat this is again by mobilizing the actual joints.

We use our hands as therapists; we use our hands to do that. We can also manipulate the neck, the spine, which is usually what we call cracking of the neck, and the purpose of that is just to loosen up the stiff joint. That's the only purpose.

It takes a few seconds and it's not a very big thing but it's very effective, and the third way we treat neck pain is by releasing the tension of the neck muscles as well. We use deep tissue neck massage, trigger point massage, try needling and basically what we do after that is we strengthen the neck, the front and the back, and also make sure we loosen up these joints on the side of the spine that runs down on your back. We always have to treat the thoracic spine, the middle part of your back, to get neck pain relieved.

Okay, it's very important and then also home exercises, it can be stretches, and a very good thing to do when you're sitting is just to do chin tucks. I know it looks a bit funny, we now look like a chicken, but it's very effective and we do this to strengthen the deep muscles in our neck, okay, the ones that keep your head on top of your shoulders. .