Most headaches tend to resolve themselves with some rest and over-the-counter pain medication. However, the recurrence of painful headaches that disrupt your day is where the situation may be considered chronic — and you may need some extra help to address the problem.
Stop headaches at their root cause instead of just addressing symptoms.
Headaches may be caused by injury, stress, or an underlying medical condition, like hypertension. So, reaching out to a professional team, like the one at Optimum Health Rehab Marietta, is crucial in getting to the root of your problem.
Learn more about how our expert care programs are designed to help you find relief. Schedule your initial consultation with our Marietta team when you call (678) 335-4865 or contact us online.
Why Seek Marietta Headache Treatment Services?
Everyone will experience a headache once in a while, but when one battles headaches every day, it takes a toll on one’s ability to work and handle daily responsibilities. There are over 150 different types of headaches that may be triggered by underlying conditions that require additional treatment outside of over-the-counter medication.
You may experience a headache when you are exposed to:
- Job hazards
- Physical strain
- Underlying health conditions
- Poor posture
- Injury
- Stress
- Dehydration
- Undernutrition
The headaches that one experiences are defined as either primary or secondary, each resulting from a different cause. Typically, primary headaches are easier to manage when they result from easy-to-address lifestyle choices like skipping meals or failing to drink enough water.
Fortunately, primary headaches are easier to resolve than secondary ones, requiring minor lifestyle adjustments, like diet changes or practicing better posture.
Headaches are a message from your body telling you something is wrong. If you are experiencing secondary headaches, the cause is more complicated and severe than a primary one.
Secondary headaches result from an underlying medical issue, indicating that the root cause of the problem may be more serious than one realizes.
At Optimum Health Rehab Marietta, all our patients undergo initial diagnostics before receiving their custom treatment program. Our objective in an initial diagnostic session is to collect all valuable information that may shed light on any past medical issues.
Your specialist will ask questions that will collect your medical history, treatment attempts, and their successes, if there were any. For more complicated headache cases, additional treatment may be needed to reduce pain, which is accomplished through a combination of physical therapy and chiropractic sessions.
Optimum Health Rehab Marietta Is Here to Help
If you have been battling consistent headaches for weeks or even months, it might be time to see someone who specializes in reducing headache occurrences finding and targeting the root cause of the problem. Realizing that you need help is the first step in addressing your problem.
At Optimum Health Rehab Marietta, we aim to identify what is causing your pain and address it at the source rather than just treat symptoms. Our treatment is not meant to create temporary relief, as an over-the-counter medication would accomplish; our goal is to do what we can to reduce or eliminate the recurrence of your headaches altogether.
Common Headache Types
If you are not active, live a sedentary lifestyle, or have a lot of stress throughout your day, you are more likely to have headaches. Patients should, overall, seek to have more active lifestyles, incorporate better diet practices, and do whatever is possible to reduce the time they remain sitting for many hours.
Although there are over 150 headaches, the most common types represent just over an initial handful. The most common headaches are:
- Cervicogenic headaches
- Cluster headaches
- Migraines
- Sinusitis
- Temporomandibular joint headache (TMJ)
- Tension headaches
Causes of Chronic Headaches
A headache occurs when pain signals interact with your blood vessels, nerves, and brain. A variety of issues can cause them but become chronic when they occur often and carry disabling levels of pain.
Headaches become chronic when they happen 15 days or more per month and last longer than three consecutive months. Often, someone will seek help to manage their symptoms only after this level of disruption to their life.
Chronic headaches are also seen in patients suffering from traumatic brain injuries, infections, changes in the pressure of the brain, and inflammation. In addition, headaches can run in families or result from environmental factors: allergies, secondhand smoke, and other triggers.
Patients experiencing these symptoms can find that they will have headaches as often as once a day, and they can be completely debilitating when they happen.
Our Approach to Treat Your Pain
The Optimum approach to handling headaches is learning about your medical history, family history, and prior treatment approaches. With that information in mind and understanding the effectiveness of your past treatments, we can tailor a custom program that is meant just for you.
Our goal is to what we can help you feel better and reduce the occurrences of your chronic headaches.
Our approach to treatment is typically one or a combination of the following types of treatment:
- Physio therapy
- Chiropractic care
- Stretching and exercising
- Lifestyle and nutritional changes
Applying Effective Chiropractic Treatments
You will start your journey toward finding relief from headache pain through physical therapy, chiropractic sessions, stretching and exercising, and implementing positive lifestyle changes. Specifically, chiropractic treatments have proven to be effective in combating the symptoms of headaches, including reducing their severity and number of occurrences.
Our approach to targeting your pain will be a combination of the following forms of chiropractic treatments, depending on your diagnosis and triggers.
Myofascial Release Therapy
Myofascial tissues are the connective membranes that support your body’s muscular structures.
When functioning normally, they help the body successfully move, allowing for a desired range of motion. However, when the connective tissues are tense and stiffened, patients begin to feel pain and experience limited mobility because of the tension.
This kind of treatment works by targeting trigger points in the myofascial tissues to improve the range of motion and reduce any pressure that is causing headaches.
Chiropractic Sessions
Patients whose programs include chiropractic sessions to treat their headaches will find relief with help realigning their spine through spinal manipulation. The spinal cord connects nerves throughout the body and sends communications from the brain to limbs, organs, and more.
A chiropractic adjustment often helps relieve tension and improve blood flow to compressed areas. With spinal manipulation and proper alignment, patients experience a reduction in headache occurrences, or they may even see them disappear altogether.
Trigger Point Massage Therapy
Like myofascial release therapy, trigger point massage therapy targets connective tissues that have become rigid, tight, or inflamed, creating a medical condition called muscle knots. Muscle knots are caused by injury, repetitive stress, and overuse of the muscles in the area.
They may happen more often than one would think, as they are a result seen in athletes and those injured in accidents.
Although muscle knots are not life-threatening, they may cause headaches depending on their location in the body. When the muscle knots are near or at the neck and back, they create pain trigger points that limit bodily mobility and cause neck pain, back pain, muscle spasms, and headaches.
With trigger point therapy and targeting these muscle knots directly, many patients see success in this treatment.
Diet or Nutritional Therapy
Our body reflects what we consume, so incorporating a good diet is critical to proper function and overall health. Patients may benefit directly from an improved diet, especially when dealing with chronic headaches.
Little changes, like reducing salt intake, reducing portion sizes, upping water intake throughout the day, and increasing vegetable and protein intake in your diet, are manageable ways to treat your headaches.
Our wellness experts will walk you through keeping a diet diary and how you may record what you eat at each meal. Keeping track of what you eat and when you experience headaches may identify meals or ingredients that are contributing to — or causing — the problem.
In addition to a change in diet, our specialist may recommend supplements to add to your diet if you are deficient. Sometimes, correcting a nutritional deficiency is enough to reduce headache pains and their occurrences.
Platelet-rich Plasma Injections (PRP)
People often associate PRP treatment with healing ligament or tendon injuries, but these shots are also excellent for those suffering from headaches. The National Headache Institute notes that PRP may result in fewer episodes and less severe pain when headaches occur for some patients.
Neurology
Our neurology team can help investigate any nerve issues that may be causing your headaches and see how they can be addressed through a neurology treatment.
Neurology is a medical practice that studies and treats the human nervous system by addressing compression and blockage, where nerves connect to the spinal cord and other parts of the body. In many cases, neurology treatments and spinal manipulation are administered in tandem to treat headaches.
Marietta Headache Treatment Specialists Are Here to Help
A regular headache is easy to tackle, with rest and over-the-counter medication as sufficient treatment for your pain. But when the headaches keep coming back — almost every day — it will greatly impact your ability to work, run errands, and do the things you love.
Treating chronic headaches is not something that you should be forced to deal with alone. Call Optimum Health Rehab Marietta to schedule your initial appointment and jumpstart treating your headaches today.
Call (678) 335-4865 or fill out our online form to schedule your initial appointment today.