Shoulder and neck pain

Over the past few several weeks at least I've been treating a lot of people with shoulder and neck pain. many of those cases have come about through injury, some waking up with a sore neck and others just with an ongoing neck problem.
While acupuncture is good for this type of problem treatment can take some time and it can be hard for the person having to deal with pain and often not getting a good nights sleep.
Like many muscular-skeletal conditions but especially with those persons with ongoing problems it's important to remember the pain is there for a reason and to eliminate it completely you must correct the underlying cause.
A lot of these problems are brought about by lifestyle, think about what you do everyday, how much repeatative movement do you do every day, is that movement the same day in day out.

I'm not suggestion you give up what you are doing to avoid this but, this type of repetition can lead to some real problems if left long enough.

What aggravates your condition and what relieves it, do more of that which relieves and less of what aggravates it. This may sound like common sence but therapists often hear things like "oh I'd just thought I could run through it ", right.

The image to the right shows the effect an imbalance of the lower body can have on the upper. In the image on the left it wouldn't be uncommon to find the neck tilted slightly to the left as a natural compensatory measure by the body to stay in balance, this could lead to any number of ongoing problems ranging from back ache to neck ache shoulder pain and headaches.
This could become a chronic situation but can be rectified
Treatment for this is important especially if it becomes chronic.
As a individual you can do a number of things to prevent such an imbalance taking place in the first place

• stay flexible ( stretching both sides of the body in the above case probably wouldn't rectify the problem
• when exercising do both sides, eg if you play golf practice swinging in the opposite direction this will help counter the one sided movement.
• if you do only running or walking also do some upper body exercise.

 One of the therapies I use in my practice is Soseitai this ia a Japanese method of therapy  in which Sotai is a part, this method works on the law of reciprocal effect, there is an explanation of this method on my site or a very good one here



feel free to leave a comment or ask a question.