Most people treat headaches like a weather event. They arrive, you manage them, they pass. But if they keep returning, the pattern is worth understanding.
Most people treat a headache like a weather event. It arrives, you take something, it passes. You move on.
But if you've had a headache more than twice this week, or a tension headache that starts at the base of your skull and wraps around to your eyes, or a migraine that knocks you out of a full day, the pattern is worth paying attention to. Not because something is necessarily seriously wrong. Because the body doesn't repeat a signal for no reason.
There's a category of headache called cervicogenic headache. Cervicogenic just means it originates from the cervical spine, the neck. The pain presents in the head, often behind one eye or across the forehead, which is why most people assume the problem is in the head.
It isn't.
The nerve roots in the upper cervical spine share pain-referral pathways with the trigeminal nerve, which covers sensation in the face and head. So when there's sustained mechanical stress in the upper neck, joints that have lost their normal movement, muscles that have been holding a compensatory position for months, the referred pain lands squarely in the head.
A 2016 systematic review in the journal Cephalalgia found cervicogenic headache accounts for up to 20 percent of chronic headache presentations. One in five people walking into a GP with recurring headaches has a neck problem generating the symptom, not a head problem.
That number is probably low. Because most of them were never asked about their neck.
Here's a useful analogy. If a warning light comes on in your car and you put a piece of tape over it, the light stops bothering you. The problem that triggered it hasn't changed. The body works the same way. Pain relief manages the signal. It doesn't address whatever the nervous system is flagging.
For cervicogenic headache specifically, the research is reasonably clear. Manual therapy directed at the upper cervical spine, combined with targeted exercise, outperforms medication management for frequency and intensity over time. A 2010 trial published in Spine found that spinal manipulative therapy reduced headache frequency significantly more than medication at both the four-week and twelve-month marks.
That's not a claim about what chiropractic does to your headaches. It's an observation about what the research shows when the structural driver of the headache is addressed.
When someone comes in with recurring headaches, we're not just asking where it hurts and how long it's been going on. We're looking at the upper cervical spine: how C1, C2 and C3 are moving, whether there's restriction or compensatory load through the suboccipital muscles, whether the pattern of pain referral matches a cervicogenic profile.
Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't, and the presentation points somewhere else entirely. Either way, knowing the driver is more useful than managing the symptom indefinitely.
If you've been living with headaches that keep returning, the question worth asking is not which painkiller works fastest. It's where the headache is actually coming from.
That answer changes what you do next.
Wild Chiropractic is a nervous system-led chiropractic practice in Shenton Park, Perth.
