b) Head and Neck

Never assume the root cause of a problem is at the place that hurts!

Trigger points cause an astonishing variety of symptoms in the head and neck region. Some of their effects may contradict a lot of what you’ve always believed. Trigger points are known to cause pain and hypersensitivity in your teeth, pain and stuffiness in your ears, pain and redness in your eyes, sinus pain and drainage, stiff neck, chronic cough, and sore throat. Trigger points can cause dizziness and balance problems. They can blur your vision and make the words dance around on the page when you’re trying to read. They can make your lips numb, your tongue hurt, or your eyelids droop (Travell and Simons 1999, 308-316).

Furthermore, trigger points are responsible for much of the pain associated with temporomandibular joint (TMJ) syndrome and are involved in important ways with the other symptoms of this disturbing condition, including popping and clicking in the jaw, dislocation of the jaw, restriction of jaw opening, and faulty closure of the teeth (1999, 379-384).

If this isn’t enough, Travell and Simons’s work has shown that trigger points are often the hidden and unsuspected cause of most headaches, no matter what name the’re given : tension headaches, cervicogenic headaches, cluster headaches, vascular headaches, or migraines (1999, 240-256, 308-314). Many recognized « headache triggers » actually have their effect by cranking up your latent trigger points. A bad cough can do it, so can a viral infection, a hangover, overexertion, analgesic rebound, and too much consumption of sugar. Trigger points are the operational element in headaches set off by allergic reactions, chemical withdrawal, physical trauma, and emotional tension. Even the frustrating, unexplainable headaches that come with fibromyalgia can be shown to be due largely to the presence of trigger points (1999, 242).

The paradox about headaches is that the cause is rarely in the parts of the head that hurt. Most headaches come from trigger points in jaw, neck, and upper back muscles. This physical distance between cause and effect is why headaches can be so mysterious and hard to deal with.

The confusing thing about neck pain is that it is referred most of the time from trigger points in the upper back and shoulders. Few things feel better than a good neck massage, but it’s massage of the upper shoulders and upper back that fixes neck pain. Neck massage fixes headaches. Trigger points in posterior neck muscles can participate in producing neck pain, but they are usually only satellites of central trigger points in the upper trapezius. Because of this satellite phenomenon, the search for the ultimate cause of chronic headaches can lead you down to this very muscle, the trapezius.

Obviously, pain and other symptoms in the head and neck area can have other causes than myofascial trigger points, but trigger points should always be one of the first things to be considered, because they can be so quickly checked out… When trigger points are the cause of your symptoms, self-applied massage will give you a degree of relief that even the strongest narcotic medecine don’t provide, and it will last longer…

Source : Clair Davies, The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook, p.50.