Muscular aches and pains are becoming common day by day. Almost all of us face some issues with our muscles and joints as we cross our student life and enter professional life especially if work involves lot of screen time and sitting.
During school days, kids are forced to sit long hours for studying in the classes as well as at home or tuition but they can still get away from pain as the body can take and forget muscular stress easily. Muscular health is also better at that time because your body is mobile, agile and undergo short periods of high activities like running, indoor or outdoor games etc. As a child your carefree attitude does help in keeping physical and mental stress under control. In addition the body weight is well under control which helps you moving faster.
With time you enter professional life and then you are bound to do a sitting job in front of laptop or computer for long hours. Gradually work and family do add up some stress to life as you want to perform better in both. That carefree attitude is gone by the time you enter professional and personal maturity. When you move less, you hamper your mobility and your strength declines due to long hours of physical inactivity. Decrease in muscular strength and mobility is just the adaptation of your body towards reduced physical activities.
Long hours of inactivity, stress and poor diet altogether increases your body weight disallowing you to remain agile the way you were during your early childhood. The collective response from your body is aches and pains gradually becoming unresolved and chronic.
Neck pain is usually very common in these conditions and can interrupt with your healthy living. It doesn't seem like an emergency but it doesn't allow you work peacefully also. By the time you realize neck pain is a problem it is too late as your body gets well adapted to your current way of living. It is so natural for all of us to find an instant cure but I wish we had such an approach to deal with it. A prolonged neck pain is a consequence of multiple changes mentioned in initial paragraphs of the article which your body has acquired in so many years. A permanent solution is reversal of at least some of those changes which definitely doesn't happen instantly.
You do not have neck pain because a particular spinal vertebrae or spinal joint has reduced space or degenerated or damaged. You have pain because you do not move functionally well as a whole. Medicines have a very limited role in treatment of neck pain. In fact anything which does not improve how you move or sit through out the day, might not help in long term when it comes to joint and muscles health.
The current evidence based information about neck pain management is as follows:
- X-Rays are not so informative in describing the source of neck pain.
- MRI is an investigation of choice but should be used very carefully as it can pick up issues which are irrelevant for your pain. Also the reporting can act as a nocebo, creating new area of pain which you never had or can delay your recovery as you might get relatable anxiety and fear-avoidance behavior leading to reduced activities.
- Electrotherapy like TENS, IFT or Diathermy doesn't have supporting evidence in treatment of prolonged neck pain.
- Therapeutic Ultrasound can provide deep tissue heat and micro-massaging effect in case of acute pain for some days but does not qualify as a treatment for neck pain.
- Wide use of mechanical traction device for neck pain has been stopped by many western countries because of associated consequences and negligible results.
- Manual (Hands-On) techniques like mobilization, manipulation and massages via osteopathy or chiropractic techniques have some effect in initiating recovery but only gives you short term relief.
- Postural Correction is also over-rated as you tend to force your weaker muscles in order to sit upright. And that conscious effort will last only for couple of minutes the moment you get busy with other things around you.
- Stretching is helpful in temporarily DE-Stressing the muscular tension and helps in regaining the range of movement.
- Strengthening the weaker muscles can help in sustaining the correct posture for long time as it reduces the stress on postural muscles. Strength training in full range of movement can help with improving your neck motion as well.
Feel free to connect with me and discuss a lot more in detail about various types of neck pain and their solutions.
Dr. Kunal Vashist,PT
MPT (Ortho), Manual Therapy
Dry Needling Practitioner
kvashist.physio@gmail.com / 9968302757
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