How To Relieve Sudden Neck Pain

How to relieve sudden neck pain. Firstly, you have to understand that the causes and dynamics of sudden neck pain is a lot different from that of chronic neck pain. The first thing, when you have sudden neck pain and if it's very, very intense, you go to your general practitioner because you might need some pain medication or some muscle relaxant.

You can also call your local physiotherapist because we are very highly trained in dealing with acute and sudden neck pain. Now, the factor which can cause the neck pain can be a pinched disk, the joint or nerve could be pinched and that stuff if addressed very soon, the prognosis is a lot better. But if you wait for a week, two weeks, that symptom can go into a chronic state and it becomes a lot more difficult to treat.

Now as therapists, we have a lot of techniques to help you with sudden neck pain. Firstly, my first advice would be to take the pressure off your neck. Particularly, you can do this by lying down.

You might need to put a few pillows under your head because lying flat might cause you more pain but firstly go and lie down and take the pressure off. Do some nice deep breathing, deep in and out and just try to stay calm and relax. Then there is another treatment technique that I use here by a man called Robin McKenzie and this is also very good for people to do at home.

Basically, what you want to do is to try and move your head basically back unto your shoulders. Now, with sudden neck pain, don't be afraid to do that, usually you know this is a movement that can help you. You can try it at home while you wait to go to the general practitioner or while you wait to go see your physiotherapist, this is called chin tucks.

What you want to do is to push your head back gently on top of your shoulders and when we do this, we are just trying to realign the neck, the vertebrae and the joints. Also, what usually happens with sudden neck pain is that there is usually muscle spasm involved and you can try a nice ice pack. Usually, it's very good because of the inflammation.

It helps calm that down and later on. If the pain is still in the muscles, you can use heat. The base is a damp heat.

To do it, you take a hot water bottle put it in a damp towel so that there is steam coming out when you put that on your neck. Just to recap, try and take the pressure off, try and do your chin tucks and make an appointment to see your general practitioner or local physiotherapist and that's how you relieve neck pain. .