Neck Pain Causes

My History

I had pain on the right side of my neck for most of my life. For most of those years I didn't know the cause, but in my case it turned out to stem from a lower shoulder / frozen shoulderthat was pulling down on my neck. I also had TMJ on my right side as well, with closed ears and frequent sinus infections. (My left shoulder was higher which caused thoracic outlet syndrome on the left side of my body).

When I was in my forties, after having two children, the pain in my neck became pretty intense. It was hard to even turn my head to back my car out of our driveway. I finally decided that I was going to just keep seeing different doctors and other health care practitioners until I found some answers. I figured that somebody, somewhere had to be able to help me.

So armed with my health insurance card, I ended up seeing several chiropractors, several physical therapists, two orthopedists, two general practitioners, an acupuncturist, two massage therapists, two yoga instructors, a Feldenkrais instructor, a biofeedback specialist, five TMJ dentists, a doctor who was also a dentist and specialized in TMJ, a physiatrist, a rhuematologist and probably some more people I can't even remember. I had made a list in advance of at least 50 people to try, and each week I would make some new appointments. Not getting any real help, I'd move on to the next names down the list. I also bought hundreds of books and did extensive Internet research to help round out my quest for answers.

One doctor I saw suggested I go to a clinic to learn to deal with my pain. I declined. I didn't want to learn to deal with the problem. I wanted to spend my energy finding the cause of my pain and getting rid of it. My root problem wasn't my pain; it was whatever was causing it. To me going to a clinic was accepting defeat, and as long as there were still books to read and people to see, I wasn't out of options.

In the end, it worked. Most of the people I saw and most of the books didn't really help all that much and some even made me worse. But in the end, the rhuematologist, one of the physical therapists and a yoga teacher were extremely knowledgeable and helpful. I also found a number of gems among the books. So now I don't have any neck aches anymore at all, after having had the problem for most of my life. It took a lot of time and a lot of money to figure it all out, but in the end my problems were all perfectly solvable.

My Neck Pain Causes

There were a number of causes to my problems as listed below:

1. I had scoliosis with a lower shoulder - The lower shoulder was pulling on my neck muscles at the squiggly line point in the diagram below, making them tight. In the front of my neck, the tendons on the right side of my neck were all taut and distended. Odd as it may sound now, I asked a lot of doctors about this and all but one said it shouldn't matter - that the lowered shoulder was unrelated to my my problems. I had my doubts, but I just wasn't sure what to do about it. It seemed logical to me that my health issues were all interconnected, but initially I could not find any health care practitioner who agreed with that premise.

Finally I found a rhuematologist and physical therapist who worked together and specialized in ergonomics and body alignment. They told me that my lowered shoulder was almost assuredly the cause of my pain, confirming the suspicions I'd had all along.

The cause of my neck pain is illustrated below. My main issue was that my shoulder muscles were out of balance. On one side the muscles were high, knotted and way over developed, and on the other side my shoulder was lower with weak, stretched out muscles. What I ended up doing to balance my muscles was to do exercises and yoga postures to raise my lowered shoulder and lower my raised shoulder. My lower shoulder ended up being lower because of tight muscles in my right leg, which over time caused a downward pull on the entire right side of my body.

The physical therapist I went to found about 50 things wrong with my body alignment and posture. It was actually great, because then I had something I could proactively work on to solve my health problems. In addition to sessions with the PT, I bought all sorts of books on posture, trigger point therapy, yoga and body alignment. Armed with the knowledge from those books and my physical therapist's treatment ideas, I finally found a way to tackle my pain problems.

2. I had nutritional deficiencies - I believe I had nutritional deficiencies that were causing my muscles to stay unusually tight. In addition to my neck problems, for most of my life I'd had anxiety problems, heart palpitations, muscle tics and twitches, bouts with insomnia, mitral valve prolapse, a near SIDs death as an infant, allergies and fibromyalgia. It turns out that these problems have all been linked to my diet, and especially to magnesium deficiencies. When I changed my diet, many of these problems started to clear up in unison.

Magnesium is the mineral needed by the body to relax muscles after a contraction, as well as hundreds of other functions. So if you are short on magnesium, your muscles never get released and stay in a contracted state and you can also have a wide variety of seemingly unrelated health problems. (For more on this topic and the specific diet changes I made to get my muscles more relaxed, see my sections on Fibromyalgia Diet and Magnesium Deficiency.)

3. I had poor posture, I used to sit hunched over a computer all day long. One thing I understand now is that whatever position your body stays in for extended periods, your muscles tend to "freeze" in that position, especially so if you are low on magnesium. So my neck would be okay when I stayed hunched over and the muscles were shortened, but as soon as I stood up, the shortened muscles would get pulled longer and go into a spasm. Correcting my posture was key in getting rid of my pain issues
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In my search for solutions to my chronic neck pain, I never found any single cure that completely eliminated the problem. What I did find were many different treatments that each helped a certain percent, and eventually those percentages added up. As I kept trying different pain prevention techniques and routines, keeping what worked and discarding what didn't, over time I was able to eliminate most of my pain.

I think the treatments that will help you the most depend on the cause of your pain. In my case my neck hurt because my shoulder was lower on that side. The whole neck and shoulder area were being pulled down and out of place be tighter and stronger muscles in my leg.

Pain will often crisscross across your body. If your neck hurts on one side, then is it likely that your hip or knee on the opposite side may also be in pain. The good news is that once you figure out where the lines of tension are in your body, you can "reverse engineer" them with muscle relaxing therapies targeted at the tension points.

The tips below are some of the ideas I found most useful.

1. The number one treatment that helped me was yoga. Below are the exercises from the yoga back and neck pain book, Back Care Basics by Mary Pullig Schatz, M.D., that I found the most helpful. The book is written by a doctor who used yoga to treat her own back pain, and now she teaches yoga to other medical professionals and patients. The book has a whole chapter on poses for a rounded upper back, forward head posture and neck pain.

The one shoulder up, one shoulder down yoga posture, page 155, is the pose I personally found the most effective. In my case, my neck pain was caused my a lowered shoulder, so to relieve the tension, I needed to raise my lowered shoulder up higher so it was not pulling down on my neck.

Yoga Pose to Raise My Shoulder - To do this pose, I put my right hand up and reach back down behind my shoulder. I reach back with my left hand and reach upwards toward my right hand, so my hands are trying to touch each other by my back, in between my shoulder blades. This helps to pull up on my right shoulder and pull down on my left shoulder. The overall results bring my shoulders into better balance and muscular equilibrium. (

Other yoga poses that helped me from this book were:

• Kneeling backbend, page 155.
• Seated twist, page 177.
• Forward triangle pose, page 178.
• Crocodile twist, page 94.
• Passive back arch, page 96.
• One leg up, one leg out, page 100.
• Chair seated twist with torso support, page 80. (I twist to my right. My neck pain was on the left. By twisting to the right it lengthens my right torso, thereby lengthening the contracted torso and paraspinal muscles on my right side.)

I try to do a minimum of at least 20 minutes of yoga each day to keep my muscles balanced. Interestingly, one of the things that makes my neck hurt again is when I go for long walks. I believe this is because when I walk a lot my leg muscles get tightened up and eventually this tension migrates upward and pulls on my neck. Now I can still walk a lot if I want to - I just have to do a longer yoga session when I get home to loosen up my leg muscles.

2. I changed and improved my diet, especially to eat more magnesium rich foods. Magnesium is needed to release contracted muscles. Foods especially high in magnesium include whole grains, nuts, seeds and leafy green vegetables. For more on my diet changes to relax my muscles, see my section on my fibromyalgia diet.

3. Moist heat really helped to reduce muscle tension for me. Warm showers and baths are a good way to relax muscles. I try to do my stretching or yoga session right after a shower or bath.

I bought some microwaveable heat packs but didn't like them because they were not washable. Instead I use a hot water bottle wrapped in a moist towel. The hot water bottle can be washed off and the towel thrown in the wash.

4. Hard Styrofoam rollers - I bought my rollers through my physical therapist, but I noticed they also sell them at our local Relax the Back store. I have a big foam roller that I lay on lengthwise that runs the length of my spine. I also have a smaller roller that I roll on with it running perpendicular to my spine. They both help to reduce muscle tension and elongate my spine and back muscles, like a rolling pin rolling out dough, only they are rolling out my tight muscles and overly tight connective tissue in my back. The big roller I roll on lengthwise is also good for correcting rounded shoulders.

5. Trigger point therapy turned out to be a surprisingly effective way of eliminating tension spots in my body. Interestingly, most of my trigger points were in my legs, even though the majority of my pain was in my jaw, neck, shoulders and back. By loosening up the tightest points in my legs, it helped relieve the downward pull on my back neck and shoulders that had been causing my pain. I went to a hand and arm clinic once and they gave me exercises that helped my shoulders and neck, but then my ankle started to get sprained very easily. It turns out that the clinic treatments had merely shifted the tension points in my body from my shoulder and neck to my legs, but had done nothing to reduce the overall tension in my body. They just showed me how to move it around. Yoga and trigger point therapy done over my whole body were more effective, because these treatments eliminated my pain, instead of just shifting the tension points.

Trigger points are tender areas where muscles are chronically tight from having been damaged over the years from factors such as falls, childhood ailments, poor posture, too much computer work, scoliosis and the stresses of daily life. By pressing on these points you can apply counter pressure and eventually eliminate them altogether. It works! If there is anything close to a miracle cure for neck and other types of pain this was it for me.

One thing that would really help is laying on a massage ball. This is a small ball I bought specifically for tight muscles. It has spines all over the outside that actually feel pretty good when they dig into your skin. I used to put the ball just below where my neck hurt and just lay on it for about 15 minutes. That would loosen up the tension in that area.

7. I changed my sleeping position. I used to sleep curled to one side in a "C" shape with one leg bent upward all night long. Initially I didn't know why I did this, I just knew it felt better to sleep that way. A massage therapist explained to me that I slept curled up because my muscles were shorter on that side of my body, so it felt good to put less pressure on them as I slept. In the long run, however, this was adding to my neck pain by keep those muscles shortened and not stretching them out. Since he explained this all to me, I now try to sleep more with both legs extended during the night. As a result, I have noticed less neck pain upon awakening.

9. I try to move around a lot during the day, limiting how much time I spend on the computer at one time. I try not to stay on the computer more than a few hours in a row. If I do because of a because of a looming deadline for some project, then I try to balance that with more yoga, trigger point therapy and general stretching afterwards. My neck pain had been it's worst when I was taking a computer programming class that had 40 hours of home work a week, plus reading and classroom time.8. I switched to a flatter pillow. My old pillow was too high, which caused my front neck muscles to shorten and my back neck muscles to become stretched out, making them unbalanced. By having a flatter pillow, it keeps my front and back neck muscles more aligned.

That's a lot of hours of just sitting motionless. My arms basically froze in a forward and down position in front of me during that semester. It took a lot of work to even be able to lay flat on the floor with my arms outstretched. My arms would pull on my neck then and it would really hurt.Now I'm much more careful to keep moving during the day.

My physical therapist suggested I not take any more classes with that much work or such stringent deadlines. I heeded his advice and took shorter classes and work at your own pace classes after that. It worked out much better for limiting my neck pain

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10. I do the tennis ball on the wall treatment. A physical therapist told me about this. I put a ball in a sock, hang it behind me and roll against the wall. It's great for loosening up my back muscles and keeping them from pulling on my neck.

11. Besides yoga, there are a couple of generalexercises I do to try to strengthen my weaker, lower shoulder which in turn helps to relieve tension on my neck. The main one is called side lying arm circles. These are similar to the arm circles most people are familiar with from high school gym class, but instead of standing, I do them lying on my side. By lying on my side when I do them, it puts less pressure on my neck, yet still strengthens and increases the flexibility in my right shoulder. I also do side lying shoulder circles. When I first started doing these exercises, I could feel that there was much more tension in my right shoulder than in my left. Over time this has evened out more as my muscles have become more balanced.

12. I bought a fanny pack to use instead of a shoulder strap purse that added weight to my shoulder. This took a lot of pressure off of my neck. For occasions when I could not use a fanny pack, I bought also bought a bag with two straps that I could wear like a backpack. This distributed the weight of the bag evenly across my shoulders caused less pain than a shoulder bag with a single strap.