One of the commonly seen problems which has been growing more and more of this technological age, are neck contractures. A contracture is a chronic shortening or tightening of a muscle or soft tissue, which makes it fixed and stiff with the soft tissues around the bones in an area that is not moving well.
It can occur from postural changes over time(slouching), traumas, neurological conditions and strokes. We will focus on the postural causes.
Due to postural changes in the neck, it can produce stiffness which can reduce your active (your ability to move under muscle power), and your passive (relaxed ability to move) global or segmental range of motion.
Unlike a muscle spasm, these are typically not painful, but tend to create secondary issues due to lack of motion.
The most concerning of these secondary issues are a result from the shorter natural range of motion. If your joints do not and can not move as designed, then they do not stimulate the cartilage on the surface of the joints. In time this cartilage will begin to deteriorate at a rapid rate compared to normal.
Please keep in mind as I am not being an alarmist/Henny Penny sky is falling. This type of deterioration happens slowly over decades, so it’s not like next Thursday if you can’t look all the way over your left shoulder you’re gonna have big problems. Just something to temper our perspective with.
Frequently we find though small/non-painful tend to get overlooked for too long before being addressed.
But once you lose motion, you start to lose function and that’s when things start changing in the tissue, and they build up cross linkages between the fibers and make it harder to reverse the process. It will take more time and money to treat it.
So how do we treat it?
Aside from all of the wonderful techniques of muscle work that we apply and utilize on patients, one of the newest tools that helps break up scar tissue is Shockwave or compression wave therapy. This puts a direct pulse of energy of a mechanical sense, directly into the tissue, helping to break up any improper Cross linkages which form from reduced motions of activities or sedentary lifestyle.
Over training and over muscularity also can bring this on. We see this frequently with athletes, particularly large athletes like football players over 300 pounds, due to their body size and muscularity can cause the tissues around the neck to stick together where it almost looks like a pack of hot dogs on the back of their neck.
Another group of people we see a lot of is truck drivers by doing DOT physicals, where we see loads with chronic range of motion reduction. There are federal standards that they have to be able to see and turn their head to a certain range of motion to effectuate their functionality and driving.
Luckily, with the treatment techniques we applied, including the newer, Shockwave therapy, we have seen great results, but the biggest factor is consistency in home stretching activities.
Once we get it moving, you need to prevent it from tightening back up. So the home care is the number one link to helping this.
Please just remember no one‘s going to care about your body and health more than you do so you need to make sure you participate in your own recovery. That will typically get you the best results.
Stay healthy, my friends,
Dr Philip A. Mahan, DC CCEP