Headaches and the Wheel Shimmy

So many people suffer unnecessarily with headaches. Pain is telling you that something is awry. Is there an alternative to taking medication to mask the pain? You bet.

Health is built on a tripod of three legs

• The structural leg

• The biochemical leg

• The emotional/electromagnetic leg.

The traditional medical model primarily will treat a patient either with medication or with surgery. Treating a headache with a medication influences only the biochemical leg.

What if there is a structural imbalance that is causing the headache? A recent study reported that 75 percent of headaches are due to structural imbalances and the medical physician is not trained to recognize structural imbalances.

Your headache is like a car with a wheel shimmy. When you are driving your car your steering wheel begins to shimmy or vibrate at a certain speed. It is commonly known that the cause of a wheel shimmy is probably either a wheel that is out of balance or a tire out of round.

If you take your “headache” car to your physician “mechanic” to fix your wheel shimmy, the physician’s biochemical approach will attempt to add “medicine” to the gas tank to rectify a problem that is emanating from the a wheel imbalance.

The wheel shimmy is a biomechanical imbalance and that requires a biomechanical solution. Using the traditional medical biochemical approach to fix a biomechanical problem may make the car feel better temporarily but it is masking the underlying and still present biomechanical issue.

I have been helping patients with their headaches for over two decades. It has been my experience that the underlying structural imbalance that is causing the headache is often far removed from the head. Just like the car with the wheel shimmy. You could address just the symptom and attempt to work on the steering wheel, but you would have little success in rectifying the problem until you deal with the cause; the imbalance in the bad wheel.

Just like the wheel imbalance is causing the symptoms in the steering wheel, the underlying structural cause of your headache could be an imbalance in your back or pelvis, or the cause could be in how you bite. Knowing that this is all interrelated, it is often necessary to coordinate my dental efforts with a chiropractor, physical therapist or osteopath. 

Often a patient will tell me that their bite feels fine and that all of their teeth hit, so that couldn’t be the problem. Unfortunately, that is not true. The jaw and muscles will torque to maximize the number of teeth hitting in order to distribute the chewing forces over as many teeth as possible, and therein lays the problem. The muscles are never allowed to relax as they have to continually brace the jaw into an accommodated position which may be causing the headaches.

It is just as common for me to refer a patient to a chiropractor, physical therapist or osteopath because the underlying primary structural issue is in the body and not in the bite. An understanding of how your bite can cause headaches or even low back pain and how an unstable pelvic/sacrum relationship can cause headaches is crucial to alleviate headaches.