Why is the Neck So Important?

What’s so important about the neck aka the “cervical spine”? 

The cervical spine connects the head to the body. It stabilizes our head and keeps us oriented and upright. It allows us to breathe, speak, and swallow. 

Here at Refuge Physiotherapy, we often see patients with neck tightness and stiffness. It can be easy to slip into the framework that insurance dictates, to compartmentalize and just treat one area of the body. However, just  because one area of the body may be the “hit taker” where you feel pain, the root cause of that pain (the “trouble makers”) may be occurring elsewhere. 

Neck pain can result from local muscle weakness at your neck that has allowed your neck to become tight and strained. Neck pain can also commonly arise from poor posture and/or thoracic stiffness. However, neck pain can also be due to compensatory muscle recruitment patterns as a result of shoulder stiffness or weakness, gait deviations due to hip or ankle pain and/or weakness, etc. Many or all of these areas may be contributing to your neck pain, so it is important to look at the whole person. 

In summary, looking not just at but around the neck can help us treat the neck more efficiently, and also, having neck pain can show us that other things may need to be addressed, which will help prevent future injury and pain.

Seeking out the root cause (or causes) and looking at the whole picture are two of the many reasons that therapy at Refuge Physiotherapy is different. We give a full, functional assessment with test and retest measures to determine the effectiveness of a treatment each and every time. If you know anyone who is experiencing neck pain, please refer them to Refuge!