The Most Common Cause Of Neck Pain After a Long Night

6/1/2017

One of the reasons people come to my office is for neck pain. This happens especially because they have slept with contracted muscles for an entire night.

What will usually happen is a patient will "fight with the pillow" during the night by pressing against the pillow.

When a person presses against the pillow with head and neck, it stresses a neck muscle called the sternocleidomastoid. This muscle is responsible for rotating our head left and right. The condition caused by stress to the sternocleidomastoid is called torticollis. The symptoms of torticollis are: neck pain, stiffness and inability to move the neck.

The treatment of torticollis is fairly simple. First we remove all the lactic acid build-up from the muscle with electric steam and heat. Second, we do a soft massage and squeeze the rest the of lactic acid out. Third, we give a chiropractic adjustment for alignment of the vertebrae. It is recommended that a patient follows up with multiple chiropractic adjustments because when the neck has been under spasm for a long period of time, the vertebra most likely will go out of alignment again.

I also recommend that my patients use natural products such as arnica cream or arnica pills and other herbs such as valerian root to help the patient relieve the muscle spasm.

If you have neck pain call you chiropractor and ask about torticollis.

Dr. Masoud Shamaeizadeh, DC of Soft Touch Chiropractic has been treating patients since 2001.

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