How to Use Massage for Headache Relief

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Dr. Susan Jewell and on behalf of Expert Village today I a going to talk to you about how to recognize and treat pain from headaches. During this clip we are going to talk about reducing stress and tension around the areas that causes a lot of headaches and that is the neck and shoulder regions. And of course if you can get somebody to do the massage for you that would be really good or you can do it for yourself or you can get massage appliances that can help do the massage yourself. If you have somebody to help you, this is what you do or you can do it yourself. The first thing we are going to do is look at the neck area. The neck region is made up of vertebra or bones that are connected together and if you really feel the back of your neck your can pressure down and you can feel the vertebra and the bones that protrude out from the end of each vertebra. The first thing that you can do is to reduce pressure by using the digits of your hand, the soft pads. You can press down on the bony spurs of the vertebra so if you press down with very hard pressure and you do circular motions on this bony part of the vertebra all the way up and down the neck region, and if you want to of course you can work down to the thoracic area and all the way. We are talking though mainly about relieving tension and migraine headache and this is one way to alleviate the pain, just do the slow circular pressure motion on the bony spurs as you keep going up in circular motions up and down the neck. Another way to release tension, of course, and help to relieve the tension of the headache is massage the shoulders. A lot of times a lot of the tension of stress at work and the way that we sit either at the computer or watching television a lot, we tend to slouch a lot. One of the ways to reduce the pressure first of all is don't slouch. Put your shoulders back and relax your shoulders and sit upright so you are sitting upright and that would also reduce the tension around here. Also give a good massage and a lot of times you just put a lot of pressure on the thumb and the fingers all around the muscle area around the shoulder and the neck area and if you work your way around the skull that would also help to relieve the pain from headaches."