Headaches and The Wheel Shimmy

So many people suffer unnecessarily with headaches. Pain is telling you that something is awry. Is there an alternative to taking medication to mask the pain? You bet!

Health is built on a tripod of three legs

The Emotional Leg:

Whenever, a patient deals with pain for any length of time there is always an emotional component. The more the pain affects their daily lives, the more emotional issues that the patient and the doctor must deal with. In some cases patients have structured their lives around dealing with chronic pain, and when the pain is alleviated, some have difficulty coping with the void that the pain used to fill.

The Biochemical Leg:

The traditional medical model primarily will treat a patient either with medication or with surgery.  Treating a headache with a medication influences only the biochemical leg. Certainly, many people choose this route. There are many drugs that the physician or pain clinic can prescribe to ameliorate head pain. As a dentist and not an expert on these pharmaceuticals, I  hope that a physician or pharmacist can add to this discussion with their input.

The Structural Leg:

What is often overlooked by the chronic headache sufferer is the structural component.

A recent study reported that a high percentage of headaches are due to structural imbalances. Sadly, the medical physician is not trained to recognize structural imbalances. It is not part of their paradigm.

The structural imbalance that could be causing the headache is like a car with a wheel shimmy. When you are driving your car, your steering wheel begins to shimmy or vibrate at a certain speed. It is commonly known that the cause of a wheel shimmy is probably either a wheel that is out of balance or a tire out of round.

If you take your “headache” car to your physician “mechanic” to fix your wheel shimmy, the physician’s biochemical approach will attempt to add “medicine” to the gas tank to rectify a problem that is emanating from the a wheel imbalance. They will be trying to rectify a structural problem with a biochemical approach, but the wheel shimmy is a biomechanical imbalance and that requires a biomechanical solution. Using the traditional medical biochemical approach to fix a biomechanical problem may make the car feel better temporarily but it is masking the underlying cause - the still present biomechanical/structural issue.

With over  two decades of experience treating patients with headaches and migraines, it is my professional opinion that the underlying structural imbalance that is causing the headache is often far removed from the head- just like the imbalanced tire causes the steering wheel to shimmy. You could attempt to work on the steering wheel, but you would have little success in rectifying the problem until you deal with the bad tire or wheel.

Just like the wheel imbalance is causing the symptoms in the steering wheel, the underlying structural cause of your headache could be an imbalance in your back or pelvis, or the cause could be in how you bite. Knowing that this is all interrelated, I have found it is often necessary to coordinate my dental efforts with a chiropractor, physical therapist or osteopath. 

Often a patient will tell me that their bite feels fine and that all of their teeth hit, so that couldn’t be the problem. Unfortunately, that is not true. The jaw and muscles will torque to maximize the number of teeth hitting in order to distribute the chewing forces over as many teeth as possible, and therein lays the problem. The muscles are never allowed to relax as they have to continually brace the jaw into an accommodated position which may be causing the headaches.  My video Myo-Fascial Pain and Headaches explains this in depth.

It is just as common for me to refer a patient to a chiropractor, physical therapist or osteopath because the underlying primary structural issue is in the body and not in the bite. An understanding of how your bite can cause headaches or even low back pain and how an unstable pelvic/sacrum relationship can cause headaches is crucial to re-establishing the proper harmony and balance while eliminating the symptoms and pain.

As a former headache suffer myself, I believe that is unnecessary to suffer.