Headaches & TMJ Treatment — Loveland, CO
Most Headaches Aren’t Caused by Stress or Your Sinuses. They Start in Your Neck.
If you get headaches regularly — especially ones that start at the base of your skull and work their way forward — your neck muscles are almost certainly involved. The same is true for jaw pain, clicking, and face tension. These problems are driven by muscles that have been overworked or shut down, and they respond very well to the right kind of PT. One80 finds exactly which muscles are driving your headaches and fixes them.
Conditions we treat
What’s causing your headaches or jaw pain?
Find your condition below. Whether it’s recurring headaches or jaw clicking and locking — the root cause is almost always a muscle problem. We identify it and fix it.
Cervicogenic Headaches (Neck Headaches)
Cervicogenic headaches start in the neck and work their way forward — often to behind one eye, the temple, or the forehead. They feel like a tension headache or a migraine, and they’re frequently misdiagnosed as one or the other. The difference: the nerve pathways that carry pain signals from the upper neck and the ones that carry pain from the head overlap in the brainstem. Neck problems can produce headache pain in your forehead.
The most common cause is deep cervical flexor inhibition — the muscles in the front of your neck that support and position your head have switched off. The suboccipital muscles at the base of your skull get chronically overloaded and start generating pain. We restore those deep neck muscles so the suboccipitals are no longer doing all the work. Most cervicogenic headache patients see significant reduction in frequency and intensity within 3–5 visits.
TMJ Dysfunction (Jaw Pain)
Clicking or popping when you chew. Pain in the jaw, face, or in front of your ear. Sometimes the jaw locks open or won’t open fully. Headaches. Neck pain. The TMJ — your jaw joint — is controlled by muscles. When those muscles are out of balance (usually because of neck muscle problems, teeth grinding, or poor jaw posture), the disc inside the joint gets displaced and you start getting clicking, pain, and locking.
Night guards protect your teeth but don’t fix the muscle imbalance causing the joint problem. We assess the jaw and neck muscles together — because they’re connected. We restore the resting tone balance between the muscles that open and close the jaw, and we address the neck muscle pattern that’s almost always contributing. When the muscles are balanced, the joint moves correctly and the symptoms resolve.