Common Symptoms of Headache

Headache and migraine are common but usually do not represent a serious illness. Even when headaches do not have a serious cause, they may be quite painful and disruptive to your daily activities. Additional symptoms may accompany a headache include:

• Eye, ear, or facial pain.
• Migraine
• Dizziness.
• Numbness or weakness.
• Difficulty with balance.
• Fever.

What causes headache/migraine?

Headache is caused by irritation or injury to pain-sensing structures of the head, such as the scalp, the muscles of the neck and head, major arteries and veins in the head, the sinuses, and the tissues that surround the brain.

Migraines are experienced as a headache of at least moderate severity usually on one side of the head and occurring with other symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, sensitivity to light and noise. The headache is usually made worse by physical activity.

How can physiotherapy and massage therapy help to relieve headache/migraine?

At Profusion Rehab, our physiotherapists will assess your neck and headaches with specific questions to rule out other causes of your pain. After diagnosing the neck as the cause of headache, treatment can be quite straightforward; We use a combination of gentle manipulation of the neck joints, massage and/or acupuncture to reduce muscle tension and stress.

During a tension headache/migraine, muscles of the scalp, jaw and neck tightly contract. The blood vessels supplying oxygen to these muscles are constricted, so that the muscles must work with an inadequate supply of nutrients. It is believed that this combination of muscle spasm and inadequate blood supply is the main cause of pain in tension headaches. Massage therapy works to reduce your pain by targeting these constricted regions, helping to increase oxygen and blood flow to tense muscles.