Neck Physiotherapy

Neck physiotherapy is becoming ever more sought after as the computer age becomes more widespread.

A bad neck can make life a misery with local nagging discomfort, painful stiffness to move, and sometimes grating sounds on turning the neck. This can refer pain to the shoulder and arm and and also cause headaches. But pain in the neck can also be associated with other more vague and hard-to-identify symptoms such as numbness of the face, pressure in the head, ants crawling up the back of the skull, inability to concentrate, nausea, labile emotions and a general paucity of cerebral function. 

Neck physiotherapy has to deal with
many strange neck symptoms

Lots of funny things happen with a bad neck. It can make your head feel too heavy for your shoulders, or give you blurred vision and you will read in the shoulder section of this website that a neck problem can cause a shoulder problem too, even frozen shoulder, if left unattended.

A big feature of a bad neck is the wide variety of symptoms related to cerebral function. This is due to the close proximity of the huge vascular system to the cervical joints. At Sarah Key Physiotherapy Sydney, we are always interested to know whether you suffer from dizziness since this may indicate vertebral artery insufficiency where it threads through the cervical vertebrae. 

Neck physiotherapy treatment needs to look carefully at many factors: working postures, faulty spinal alignment, feet problems and other skeletal anomalies. All the The Sarah Key Physiotherapy Sydney Centre all the physios are trained specifically to treat neck problems. We use our hands to palpate what's going on in the neck and thorax and we have unusually long assessments in our initial consultations, so we have the time to get to the bottom of things.

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Read all about the way the Neck works and the important neck fixing exercises 

The Way the Neck Works

The neck is much more mobile than any other part of the spine. In contrast to the thorax and low back the discs are very fat to allow better clearance of the vertebrae twisting and turning on top of one another.

The discs are less likely to cause trouble in the neck than the facet joints, which are huge with a large, baggy joint capsule that is highly wired for pain. The near horizontal orientation of the facet joints allows freedom for the neck to bend and swivel freely. This provides wide-ranging head/neck movement to put the sensory organs of the head (eyes, ears, nose and mouth) into places and attitudes that are useful.

But the grand mobility of the neck can lead to problems and this is complicated by it having to support  - and put about - an incredibly heavy (5kg) head. People with a bad neck invariably feel their head is too heavy for their neck. 

 
neck physiotherapy at the sarah key clinic in sydney

For a neck to work painlessly it needs to be mobile at all its intricate spinal levels.  Alarm signals in the form of pain go out if the neck starts running badly – and this gives you the best chance to get things fixed. Pain-as-a-flag is an evolutionary imperative, since you become steadily more disadvantaged if your vital senses remain discommoded. If you can’t turn your head to see danger approaching – be it a motor cyclist as you step off the curb, or a Cro-magnon man wielding a club - you won’t last long. To speed along your recovery, you can make an appointment here.

Effective neck physiotherapy involves careful exploratory palpation with probing hands to find the problem in the neck’s machinery. When it has been found – literally pin-pointed with the fingers as the pain is touched - the problem is routed and the muscle relax. The neck starts to run freely again as the mobility returns. 

Sarah Key Physiotherapy in downtown Sydney can provide this sort of skilled treatment. All physiotherapists on the staff have extra training by Sarah Key.

What are the Pillars of Self-Treatment Neck Physiotherapy?

Neck movement starts from waist level. For this reason, having better freedom of the thorax makes it much easier for our physiotherapists at to get your neck better. Using the BackBlock for thoracic spine decompression and postural realignment is a critically important part of treatment for just about any bad neck. Only you can do this part of the treatment.

When you have neck treatment with therapists from Sarah Key Physiotherapy you will be shown how to place the BackBlock under your upper back (there are several positions). You will be asked to carry out your own regime and to do this every day at home, as part of your overall treatment.

Using the BackBlock under the thoracic spine to bring about spinal decompression and correct postural anomalies is critically important for almost all neck treatment.

Watch Sarah's YouTube Clip of the Ma Roller For Effective Neck Physiotherapy

Breathing and Neck Problems

Better breathing is a basic foundation of all healthy living.

Using the thoracic BackBlock as a spinal compression technique also frees off the chest cage where the ribs key into the sides of the spine and this has very important implications for your health generally.

When the ribs are free to move unhampered your breathing is much more efficient. Interestingly enough, the converse is also true: using the upper chest and neck muscles to breathe, instead of the diaphragm, is a very important and fundamental cause of chronic neck problems. Believe it or not, better breathing relieves chronic neck pain.

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Read more about 'touching the pain' in What is Physiotherapy?

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