Natural neck alignment is simple: when you are facing straightforward, your ear should be directly above your shoulder. However, many people don’t maintain that strong, healthy stance. If your ear is positioned in front of your shoulders, that’s called forward head posture, and it puts your health at risk.
Mobile injuries: text neck
In recent years, forward head posture has become increasingly common as our spines have bent forward toward our digital devices. In turn, the misalignment condition is now often framed as text neck.
“Text neck is not just a texting problem,” clarified Dr. Dean Fishman. “Text neck is a gaming problem. Text neck is an e-mailing problem.”
Fishman coined the term when a teenage patient came to him complaining of chronic headaches, and he noticed the patient craning her neck as she sent a message on her phone.
Research featured in Surgical Technology International showed why it’s so common for people to need neck pain relief from mobile device use: slouching forward to see a phone that’s held at hip level can increase the amount of force on your neck by as much as 500% (10-12 pounds “at ease” vs. 60 pounds at a 60-degree forward tilt).
Doctors agree on forward head posture
Dr. Adalbert I. Kapandji’s landmark book The Physiology of the Joints agrees with the above study: as your head posture shifts forward, you add 10 pounds for every inch of tilt. The slouching causes multiple structural issues, treatable with chiropractic care.
Nerve compression in the area can lead to headaches, as indicated by Dr. Frank M. Painter, DC: “This … forces the suboccipital muscles … to remain in constant contraction, putting pressure on the 3 Suboccipital nerves,” he advised. “This nerve compression may cause headaches at the base of the skull [or] mimic sinus … headaches.”
Rene Cailliet, MD, of the University of Southern California concurred, stating that forward head posture increases force on the cervical spine by as much as 30 pounds, potentially hampering oxygen access by reducing lung capacity up to 30%.
It’s not just about headache & neck pain relief
Forward head posture, also called hyperkyphotic posture, can actually be deadly. Recent research revealed that, all else equal, people whose heads have drifted out in advance of their spines have a 1.44 higher likelihood of death.
Chiropractors often see patients whose heads are initially two inches farther forward than is ideal. With the nerve impingement that arises from this misalignment, it’s no wonder that they are experiencing excruciating pain.
The good news is that the long-term solution is simple. Chiropractic care provides lasting pain relief. Get help now!