Beating neck pain from working at the computer
Samantha Campbell • 16 February 2020
Beating Neck Pain from Working at the Computer
Poor posture while working at a desk with a computer can build up over time to cause painful problems.
This week we had a female patient presenting with neck pain and headaches. She had pain radiating up from her mid-thoracic spine and shoulder blade, up into the neck, the shoulder and down the arm. She had also had a headache for a couple of days.
This is quite a common problem that we see, especially in people who spend long periods sitting at desks and looking at computer screens.
We examined her and determined that the pain generator was an upper trapezius trigger point. She also had a lot of dysfunction in the joints of the part of spine where the neck joins upper thoracic spine in the upper back, called the Cervico Thoracic Junction (CTJ).
The dysfunction was that the joints were not moving smoothly or in their full range of movement. Without the full range of movement, the muscles around the joints were having to work extra hard. Over time this causes the muscles to shorten and contract too much.
The additional wear through the muscles can cause specific areas of tightness, which we call trigger points. Trigger points were sending her brain a message saying “I’m in trouble. There’s a problem here!” Because of the way the brain receives these messages from these muscles - and most muscles - she was perceiving the pain elsewhere.
We gave her a thorough examination to find out exactly where the pain was coming from. We adjusted the segments of her spine that weren’t working properly and her shoulder. We also found that her pectoral muscles had over tightened and pulled her shoulder around,trying to compensate for the tightness in the back of her shoulder, so we adjusted the collar bone.
With all of that released, we needled the upper trap to deal with the trigger point specifically and the patient went away happy.
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