Can Chiropractic Adjustments Help Headaches?

Experts report that 157 million work days are lost each year in the United States due to headaches at a cost of about $50 billion in work absenteeism and medical expenses. According tocurrent estimates, about 18% of chronic headache patients are believed to have cervicogenic headaches (CGH), or headaches that originate from dysfunction in the neck.

Many CGH sufferers utilize complementary and integrative health treatment approaches for neck pain and headaches, of which spinal manipulative therapy (SMT) is the most common. While past studies have demonstrated SMT to be a superior form of treatment for CGH, no one has investigated how many treatments are needed to achieve the maximum clinical benefit for CGH patients – at least not until recently!

In order to determine what dose of SMT may best benefit patients with headaches originating from the neck, researchers randomized 256 CGH patients into four treatment groups that received 0, 6, 12, or 18 SMT treatments over the course of six weeks. The researchers found a dose-dependent relationship between SMT and days without CGH over the following year with patients in the 18 visit group experiencing 16 fewer days with CGH over the next twelve months than those in the zero treatment group.

The chiropractic spinal manipulative therapy treatment used in the study consisted of high-velocity, low-amplitude thrust manipulation in the neck and upper back regions (specifically, occiput to T3) aimed at sites with detected joint dysfunction (fixation or pain), which is typically the method most chiropractors determine where to apply spinal manipulation.

This study is VERY important for a few reasons: 1) it proves SMT helps patients with CGH; 2) it provides doctors of chiropractic with an idea of how many visits it may take to obtain optimum results; and 3) it can be used as a guideline when managing CGH patients, stressing the important point that EACH patient is UNIQUE and modifications may be appropriate depending on each case.