Here's To Your Health

by Wendy Johnson, LMT, CMT, SMT, NCBTMB

Tension headaches are headaches with muscular origins and are associate with trigger points and other myofascial pain syndromes (Travell, Simons, 1983)

Symptoms include but are not limited to:

• 63% of men and up to 86% of women experience them; chronic headaches occur in 3% of people (Silberstein et al., 1998)
• There is a family history in 40 to 50 per cent of these headache sufferers (Silberstein et al., 1998)
• The pain is bilateral, diffuse and constant with tension headaches. It may be dull or vise-like. The location of the pain is often in the referral pattern of trigger points in specific muslces (Travell, Simons, 1983)
• These headaches begin in early adulthood
• Frequency is variable
• Duration is from 30 minutes to weeks. A chronic tension headache is on that lasts more than 15 days (Cady, Fox, 1995)
• Onset of tension headaches is usually later in the afternoon after latent trigger points have been activated.

Surprisingly, many non-typically known factors contribute to headache pain including:

• Neck tie pressure,
• Tight muscles on the back of head and shoulders,
• Sinus fluid,

to name a few.

The good news is there are several massage related solutions that ease and prevent tension headache pain. At Here’s to Your Health all of our Clinical Massage Therapists have been trained on the therapeutic, clinical techniques used to help relieve tension and sinus headaches and keep them at bay.

During my externship training at Swedish Covenant Hospital in Chicago, I spent Thursday evenings providing therapeutic, clinical massage therapy to patients in ICU. My classmates and I quickly realized that the RN’s we worked with needed massage just as much as their patients. We made it our practice to spend downtime providing chair massage to RN’s in our unit. Not surprisingly they all had the same symptoms, rock hard shoulders and chronic tension headaches.

One particular evening, I worked on an RN suffering from a chronic tension headache. Her shoulder muscles were tight and hypertonic, and the lateral group of suboccipital muscles at the base of her skull were tight and tender with light compression.

I began her chair massage session by applying compression strokes to her shoulders, softening her larger muscle groups. Next, I cleared the golgi tendon organs of her tightest muscles creating more release. Then I worked the belly of each muscle checking for trigger points (muscle knots with referral pain) and releasing them until pain was no longer present. I applied a few PNF techniques, stretches and ended with tapotement to re-energize her muscles. When I finished she was delightfully surprised that the tension headache she had been battling all day was completely gone. What a satisfying moment for the both of us!

That night I felt a great sense of accomplishment and respect for the Clinical Massage techniques I had been taught. Providing relief to such a special person felt wonderful. As a Clinical Massage Therapists in the making, we were not only able to bring comfort and relief to patients, but to those who cared for them as well.

When it comes to tension and sinus headache pain, we know relief can’t come quickly enough. We also know that most folks would prefer a preventative solution to tight, tension filled muscles as opposed to a band-aid approach. With a few postural awareness changes and a focused clinical massage regime, tension headaches can be a thing of the past.

To schedule your next massage therapy session, just give us a call at 773-517-8853.

*We are not physicians and do not diagnose conditions.

*Symptom profiles from Clinical Massage Therapy by Fiona Rattray and Linda Ludwig