Condition
Neck Pain
Rarely about how you sit. Usually about how long you sit that way.
2 in 3
adults will have significant neck pain in their lifetime
Mechanical neck pain responds well to targeted manual care — once we know which segments are genuinely restricted and whether a nerve is involved.
What it feels like
- Stiffness and restricted rotation, often worse on one side
- A dull ache at the base of the skull, sometimes becoming a headache
- Pain between the shoulder blades that tracks with neck movement
- Numbness, tingling, or weakness into the arm or hand
- Waking with a locked neck after sleeping awkwardly
What tends to cause it
- Segmental restriction, most often in the upper or mid cervical spine
- Sustained flexed posture at a desk or phone
- Facet joint irritation and capsular guarding
- Cervical disc involvement with or without nerve root compression
- Trauma, most commonly whiplash from a collision
- Stress-driven sustained muscle tension through the upper trapezius
The neck carries a five-kilogram head on seven small, highly mobile vertebrae, and it has to do that while allowing more range of motion than any other region of your spine. Mobility and stability are competing demands, and the cervical spine is permanently negotiating between them.
Why the mid-back keeps coming up
Rotation is meant to be shared. Roughly speaking, your thoracic spine should contribute a substantial portion of the turn when you look over your shoulder.
Sit at a desk long enough and the thoracic spine stiffens into slight flexion and stops rotating well. The demand does not go away — you still need to check your blind spot — so the cervical spine absorbs the shortfall. Every day. For years.
This is why we assess and treat the thoracic spine in nearly every neck case, and why patients are sometimes surprised to have their mid-back worked on when their neck is what hurts.
About that “text neck” number
You have probably seen the claim that looking down at your phone puts 60 pounds of load through your neck. That figure comes from a biomechanical model, not from measurement in living people, and it has been repeated well past what it can support.
Load does increase with flexion — that part is true. But there is no good evidence that phone use is producing a generation of damaged necks, and framing it that way mostly makes people anxious about a posture they will adopt anyway.
Move more often. That is the actionable part.
How we treat it here
Test each segment individually
Seven cervical vertebrae, each with its own motion. We assess them one at a time. Restriction at C1–C2 produces a completely different picture than a lower cervical disc, and treating the wrong one is why so much neck care underperforms.
Screen the nerve
If you have arm symptoms, we test reflexes, sensation, and strength by nerve root level before anything else happens. Arm symptoms change the plan and sometimes change the provider.
Free the segment, quiet the tissue
Adjustment where restriction exists, soft tissue and needling for the guarding around it. Low-force techniques for anyone uncomfortable with cervical manipulation — the results hold up fine.
Give the thoracic spine its job back
A mid-back that has stopped rotating forces the neck to make up the difference. Treating the neck alone in a stiff thoracic spine buys you about ten days.
Neck pain
Questions we get about this.
Is neck manipulation safe?
This deserves a direct answer. There has been long-running debate about a possible association between cervical manipulation and vertebral artery dissection, a rare but serious event. The current weight of evidence suggests that where these occur together, the patient was frequently already experiencing a dissection in progress — the neck pain and headache it causes is what brought them in. That said, the debate is not fully settled. We screen for vascular risk factors before any cervical work, and we offer instrument-assisted and mobilisation-based alternatives to anyone who prefers them. Those alternatives work. If you are uneasy about it, say so and we will simply do something else.
Is my phone causing this?
Sustained flexion contributes, but the mechanism is time under load rather than the specific angle. Forty-five minutes without moving is the problem. Changing position regularly matters more than achieving a perfect one.
Why does my neck pain give me headaches?
The upper three cervical nerve roots share processing pathways in the brainstem with the trigeminal nerve, which serves your face and head. Your nervous system genuinely cannot always distinguish the source, so upper cervical irritation gets experienced as head pain. These are called cervicogenic headaches and they respond very well to treating the neck.
Will a new pillow fix it?
A pillow that keeps your neck neutral helps you not make it worse overnight. It does not treat an existing restriction. Side sleepers generally need more loft than back sleepers; stomach sleeping is difficult to do well because it requires end-range rotation for hours.
New patient special — $59 New Patient Visit
Get your neck pain properly examined.
One visit, a real diagnosis, and a plan with a visit count and an end date. If it turns out we are not the right provider, we will say so and point you to who is.
Columbus, OH · Same-week appointments · Most insurance accepted